New Endoscope Decontamination Unit is launched

High demand

With an estimated 10% year-on-year increase in the number of patients requiring an endoscopy procedure, driven in part by the NHS Bowel Scope Screening programme, hospital decontamination facilities are managing heavy workloads. Any closures, whether unplanned or as part of a scheduled refurbishment, can have a significant impact on the hospital’s service provision. The development and launch of this mobile facility will support endoscopy departments. Using it, they can stay a step ahead of any refurbishment projects, planned ‘end of life cycle’ equipment replacement or capacity challenges. This creates cost and time efficiencies by acting as an alternative route for satisfying all their flexible endoscope decontamination needs.

A new, compliant solution

To ensure clinical adjacency, we can situate the fully HTM-compliant, 15m x 5m facility as close to the endoscopy suite as possible. Our engineers have designed it with the resilience to deal with a large trust’s capacity requirements, processing up to 120 endoscopes per day.

It houses a range of sophisticated equipment, including four automated endoscope reprocessing machines (AERs), a duplex reverse osmosis water treatment system, two endoscopy-grade double sinks and two drying cabinets.  In addition, it features a staff welfare area, climate-controlled environment and toilet facilities, ensuring a quiet and comfortable workspace for staff.

Steve Peak, our Delivery and Development, says, “Our unit is designed to enable hospitals to continue endoscopy services safely and effectively, either when in-house decontamination is running at full capacity, or equipment needs to be replaced or is out of service. We are excited to be bringing this new product to market and delighted that our facility will provide staff with a resource to help maintain the patient flow during otherwise challenging periods of downtime.”

We have significant experience in providing additional capacity to healthcare providers during periods of refurbishment or high demand, enabling the delivery of the highest standards of patient care. Clinicians have conducted more than 46,000 procedures in our manned mobile endoscopy suites, which include inbuilt decontamination facilities, to date.