A recent AORN article, Key Takeaways: 3 New Instrument Cleaning Guideline Updates to Improve Sterilization & Safety, highlights new guidelines for care and cleaning of surgical instruments, noting the strengthened recommendations for borescope inspections of instruments.  

As we noted previously, reusable medical instruments, especially the depth gauge, can be difficult to clean and sterilize, often retaining debris.  The reusable depth gauge is particularly challenging, as it requires disassembly, cleaning, sterilization, and reassembly, adding complexity and risk of missing parts or incorrect assembly.  

What is a Borescope? 

With applications across many industries, the borescope is a visual inspection tool for non-destructive testing and optical examination of hard-to-reach areas.  Borescopes have been widely used across industries such as: 

• Aerospace and Aviation: Used for inspecting aircraft engines, turbines, and other critical components.   

• Automotive Industry: Inspect internal engine components, such as cylinders and valves, for signs of damage or wear.  

• Manufacturing: In manufacturing, borescopes inspect the internal surfaces of machined or cast parts.  

• Oil and Gas: Borescopes are crucial in the oil and gas industry for inspecting pipelines, valves, and other equipment.  

Borescopes allow for quick assessments of internal conditions, helping to prevent costly breakdowns and ensuring operational safety across these industries and many others.  

Borescopes in medicine – finding what lies beneath 

In a recent article in Infection Control Today, “What Lies Beneath: Why Borescopes Are Essential for Verifying Surgical Instrument Cleanliness”, the author highlights the importance of borescopes as “an indispensable tool for sterile processing teams, offering the only reliable way to verify internal cleanliness and improve sterile processing effectiveness to prevent patient harm.”  

The article notes that IFUs are not always sufficient guidelines for cleaning, and the design of instruments makes cleaning extremely difficult.  The use of borescopes becomes essential for SPD teams to verify internal cleanliness.  

More time lost in Sterile Processing 

For cannulated instruments, the cleaning and sterilization process generally involves a labor-intensive process that includes cleaning with a brush and flushing with a bulb syringe.  The introduction of a borescope for inspection created more work, additional tasks to check off, and challenges in quality control. 

The use of borescopes as part of the inspection process may only be the beginning. Borescopes are becoming a requirement for arthroscopic shavers, and there is an expectation that Frazier and Yankaur suctions are not far behind.  Soon, all long-cannulated Ortho and spine instruments will have these requirements, only adding to the SPD workload.  

Move to single-patient-use instruments whenever possible 

The need to use borescopes to verify that medical instruments are clean highlights the larger problem.  Reusable devices quite simply bring an inherent risk.  The SPD team works hard, with limited staff and unreliable IFUs, to clean instruments, many of which are simply too complex to clean. Adding more inspection requirements only increases the burden.  

Moving to single-patient-use instruments whenever possible.  This ensures sterility, eliminates the need for cleaning, and removes the need to verify cleanliness and sterility with a borescope.   

The reusable depth gauge is a particularly difficult device to clean.  It only makes sense to switch to the single-patient-use digital depth gauge by EDG(R). Arriving double-packaged, EDG(R) eliminates the risk of contamination that comes from reusable depth gauges, ultimately leading to one less instrument for SPD to clean. 

Learn more about the digital depth gauge for EDGE Surgical today!