Infection Control

Dental professionals spend numerous hours a day dental practices reprocessing dental instruments. We open the box of sterilization pouches, fill them with instruments and send them to the heat and pressure of our autoclaves. How much thought do we put into that little plastic and paper bag?

Sterilization process challenging is not a new concept. It’s important for any industry that operates a sterilizer to develop a thorough quality assurance sterilization monitoring program. Notice how I called it a sterilization monitoring program. Sterilization testing is a disjointed task in many dental offices because it is not viewed as its own system within IPAC.

The two most popular alcohols used as disinfectants are ethyl alcohol (or ethanol) and isopropyl alcohol .

While both show potent germicidal activity, they have different applications in dental/medical environments.

Let's review the similarities and differences between them and understand which one is better suited for your dental facility.

Infection control is an indispensable part of hospital environments and medical settings.

Regular disinfection ensures that working surfaces are kept clean, and potential pathogens like bacteria, viruses, and fungi are eliminated, thus reducing the risk of passing on contamination between patients and between patients and the clinic or hospital staff.

Several types of disinfectants are available in the market, each with a different active component in variable ratios and concentrations.

The choice of disinfectant depends on the spectrum of antimicrobial activity, access, safety factors, handling factors, contact time, and ease of use.

The names isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and isopropanol are synonymous.

A hand hygiene program is embedded within the contents of an office's IPAC Program and is often ill-defined. Dental offices may be performing hand hygiene tasks, have procured the necessary products and posted directions for proper hand hygiene, however, it goes much further than this.

In the current situation of dental office closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there are varying degrees of concerns that dental professionals are facing. Myself, as an RDH working clinically and an IPAC educator, I have a constant barrage of "what’s and if’s" anxiously circling through my mind like a movie stuck on repeat.

The maxill PCD is part of ‘Batch Monitoring’ in the quality assurance of sterilization. Currently Health Canada does not regulate PCDs and therefore the batch monitoring PCD is not listed as a medical device.

When you're using a manufacturer process challenge device for stream sterilization, does a Type V chemical indicator still need to be placed in every package? The best approach to answering this question is to step back and review the job of the chemical indicators.

maxill is proud to introduce the ‘new guy’ in the IPAC line up of products… The Process Challenge Device (PCD). A PCD is a key element in the quality assurance testing of dental office sterilizers. It is used to monitor the performance of the sterilization process. The PCD simulates an equal or greater challenge than the most difficult instrument/item routinely processed in a sterilization cycle. Each day and each cycle used requires the use of a PCD. Adding a more rigorous approach to testing follows best practice within the risk management of the theory of routine practice principles of infection prevention and control.