1.1 Introduction
Decontamination and disinfection mean different things to different people. Patients enter a hospital or healthcare environment to have one particular ailment treated and all health professionals undertake their roles to ensure that patients depart hospitals with their illnesses treated and/or progressing towards good health. To this end there are multiple protocols, guidance documents and standards in place to protect the patient and prevent them from being harmed during their stay in hospital. However, hospital-acquired infections are a constant part of our everyday life in the healthcare sector and account for many deaths and increased costs (1, 2). As healthcare professionals, healthcare-acquired infection (HAI) should not be acceptable, and as such, multiple targets are set to monitor HAI rates and hospitals are judged by their achievements in reducing these rates.
Historically, surgeons, clinicians and nursing professionals have recognised the risk to patients from the presence of microorganisms that are ubiquitous in our healthcare centres. The programmes in place today that reinforce hand hygiene policies, such as the WHO's five (3) principles in hand washing, owe their validity to Alexander Gordon (4) and Ignaz Semmelweis (5), with the latter recommending that all staff and students wash their hands in âchlorina liquidaâ (known to be a disinfectant), later changing to the cheaper âchloride of limeâ. First discovered in 1744 and still widely used today, chlorine, as a disinfectant, was listed in the London Pharmacopeia (1836) and recommended as a gargle for infected throats (6) before being used by Semmelweis for the routine disinfection of hands in his study in the prevention of puerperal fever in maternity wards (5). By the 1880 s Koch had recognised the importance of disinfectants as well as the susceptibility of different microorganisms to different active agents when he studied over 70 compounds and declared mercuric chloride as the most effective product as it was effective against spores (7).
However, what we have to take into consideration is that the healthcare environment is not sterile and that âdisinfection and decontaminationâ of the environment, ward or hospital theatre reduces microorganisms to a safe level leading to improved HAI rates. Florence Nightingale recognised the importance of âclean and dry bed and beddingâ as well as âcleanliness of room and wallsâ and this facet of improving cleanliness around the patient and reducing the presence of microorganisms (i.e. cleaning and decontamination) would have improved the well-being of the patient (8). In contrast, âsterilisationâ of medical devices or surgical instruments is the absolute removal of microorganisms ensuring that the device is safe to use on a patient. Sterilisation is an absolute term for destruction of bacteria, spores and viruses and all living microorganisms.
However, the discovery of prions and their survival, following autoclaving, in sufficient concentrations to cause disease via surgical instrumentation has led to a re-evaluation of cleaning, disinfection and sterilisation across the whole sector of patient care (9).
1.2 Microbial resistance and infection control
Microorganisms differ in their susceptibilities to disinfectants, with vegetative bacteria being the most sensitive and spores being the most resistant, though prions are more resistant than spores (Table 1.1). In the 1960s, Spaulding's approach to disinfection and sterilisation of medical devices was based on the categorisation of critical (enter sterile tissue), semi-critical (contact mucous membranes or non-intact skin) and non-critical devices (contact with intact skin but not mucous membranes), which was dependent on the degree of infection risk associated with the use of particular items (10).
Table 1.1
Susceptibility of different types of microorganisms to decontamination
Resistance | Microorganisms |
Very resistant | Prions |
More resistant | Bacterial spores |
Less sensitive | Mycobacteria, protozoal cysts and non-enveloped viruses (Polis, Hep A) |
Most sensitive | Vegetative bacteria, enveloped viruses (HIV, RSV, Hep B), fungi (and their spores), non-encysted protozoa |
Infection control, contamination of wards and the environment, as well as operating theatres, have been at the forefront of infection control policies for many years. However, the decontamination and sterilisation of surgical instruments has for some time been treated as the Cinderella of healthcare, e.g. often located in the basements in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind scenario.
Whilst biocides and disinfectants have been discovered and developed for the decontamination of bacteria and viruses, it was the development of the autoclave that provided the assurance that the risk of transmission of bacteria and viruses was ultimately controlled through the use of heat and pressure. The first publication on the development of the autoclave appeared in 1681 as a digester for softening bones and in the 1830 s it was further developed for the control of fomites (11, 12) from infected persons. Research by Koch (1881) that identified that moist heat was more effective than dry heat led to the autoclaves that were later developed for clinical use (13).
Sterilisation via autoclaving was deemed to be a fail-safe mechanism of providing medical and surgical devices that would be microbiologically safe to use. Whilst there have been failures in the autoclaves or associated process, these have been rare (14â16), resulting in patients becoming infected, a properly and effectively validated steriliser will achieve a 106 log reduction of microorganisms.
Today, there are major issues concerning the transmission of HAI in a modern healthcare setting. These issues include the emergence of antibiotic resistant microorganisms (17, 18). Antibiotics were initially seen as the major weapon in the fight against microbial infections and, in many cases, still are, and are able to prevent many deaths through the control of those infections. Yet in developed countries antibiotic resistance is such an issue that many microorganisms are multidrug resistant and hence difficult to treat. Whilst some microorganisms can be naturally susceptible to antibiotics, problems occur both for patients and clinicians where microorganisms that were susceptible to antibiotics become resistant, often to the transfer of resistance genes from one microbial host (resistant) to a microbial recipient (was susceptible and will become resistant) (19, 20).
HAI rates are now collected and reported regularly, e.g. quarterly and annually, are publically available and are compared against other time points and against different trusts. HAI numbers have ...