부산대학교 도서관

Medical devices provide significant benefits to medical diagnosis and treatment. However, owing to the surmounting expenses from the use of single-use devices (SUDs) and the limitations of insurance claims, these devices may undergo instrumentation reprocessing and sterilization for repeated use. Such practice may cause a high risk to patients. Henceforth, this leads to the risk of incomplete disinfection or changes to certain specifications and properties of medical devices during the reprocessing, which might not meet manufacturers' quality standards. Owing to the increasing cost, limited resources, and urge for economic efficiency, repeated consumption of single-use devices becomes an unavoidable trend in the future medical environment. The corresponding consequences of repeated disinfection and infection control would become predictable. This article presents measures of infection control for repeated consumption of single-use medical devices, which include risk assessment, labeling management, quality control, operational management, education, moral ethics, and law enforcement. Despite the mutual agreement toward the cost-benefits brought by repeated consumption of medical devices, the overall impact over its effectiveness, safety, and quality issues has to be considered to ensure the overall safety of patients. In view of this, our goal is to ensure the security of repeated use of medical devices, monitor their status, track the number of repeated use, conduct internal staff training, and gather acknowledgements of patients and targeted users.