Application of Pulsating Vacuum Cleaning Technology to Medical Devices Cleaning

Abstract

This study aims to solve existing problems in cleaning medical devices, such as the cumbersome loading of minimally invasive surgical instruments, the incomplete cleaning of instruments with complex structures, and the low cleaning efficiency of ordinary instruments. A pulsating vacuum cleaning machine was combined with ultrasonic cleaning and boiling cleaning technology to clean various complex medical devices through a pressure pulsating process (i.e., repetitive pump-out and pumpin until the cleaning results meet the cleaning standards for medical devices). The cleaning results of spay washing, ultrasound cleaning and pulsating vacuum cleaning were compared among four groups of medical devices, including silica gel hoses, chamber instruments, whole box of minimally invasive instruments and surgical instruments. The amount of protein residues was tested using the spectrophotometric method. The testing results revealed that the loading capacity of a pulsating vacuum cleaning machine is 3–4 times as much as that of an ordinary spray cleaning machine, without manual placement and connection operation required, which reduced the workload of pretreatment. The protein residue after cleaning meets the requirements of the YY/T0734 standard for the cleaning effect of medical devices. Pulsating vacuum cleaning technology has an overall better loading capacity, when compared to spay washing and ultrasound cleaning, and this can make up for the shortcomings of commonly used cleaning machines, such as the low cleaning efficiency and unsatisfactory cleaning results of medical devices with complex structures.