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Interhospital transportation. Monitoring sterility of instrument packs.

The Minneapolis-St Paul area is currently experiencing an increase in health care mergers among hospitals. As new facilities are acquired, whether through merger or the building of satellite hospitals, economic considerations often instigate the consolidation of certain departments and services. Thus, hospitals are confronted with a new set of management problems. One such problem might be determining if the probability of contamination increases when a sterile pack is transported from the central sterile supply department of one hospital to the operating room of another hospital. This study indicates that interhospital transport of surgical packs, using a specially designed transfer system, can be accomplished without compromising the sterile status to a significantly greater degree than that associated with transport within a hospital. Many more samples would have to be assayed before these results could be considered conclusive. This study proposes a simple, reproducible, microbiologically sensitive and statistically satisfactory test to monitor the sterile integrity of surgical packs. In the past, different sterility monitoring methods proposed have required either special equipment, specially trained personnel, or complicated procedures. The assay method described here can be easily used by central sterile supply department personnel to monitor the sterile status of transported or stored surgical packs.