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Increasing Care Efficiency and Patient Safety with a Pass-Through 

Demystifying the Pass-Through Cabinet

First of all, what is a Pass-Through medical cabinet?

The term "pass-through cabinets" describes any storage enclosure in healthcare facilities where the cabinet is mounted directly into the wall. The purpose of the wall insertion is to make the pass-through chamber accessible from both sides of two adjacent rooms.

This type of cabinet, which can also be described as a "pass-through," is used to store medical supplies in treatment rooms. A member of the supply team stores the supplies on one side while the health care team can access the supplies from inside the room where the patient is being treated.

What are the goals of a pass-through?

First, the pass-through reduces the amount of time medical staff spends picking up needed supplies for patients from a central supply room.

Since most nurses are often overworked, the proximity of supplies can make all the difference in giving back to patients, valuable time that is therefore recovered.

Pass-through cabinets also reduce the risk of cross-contamination by limiting the number of hospital staff who enter patient rooms.

In addition to these benefits, there are also special care cases where it is necessary to maintain strict isolation protocols in hospital settings.

More and more hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities are realizing that installing a pass-through can help them be more efficient and provide better patient care.

How does a pass-through scope cabinet work? 

Here's a concrete example

Once an endoscope is used, it must be reprocessed. This step requires compliance with existing standards and guidelines for effective endoscope reprocessing.

The goal of endoscope reprocessing is to provide a reusable and safe endoscope for patients. To achieve this, healthcare facilities use best practices for pre-cleaning, cleaning and disinfection, all based on proven endoscope reprocessing tests.

It is important to recognize that improper use, transport as well as reprocessing of endoscopes can create a potential risk for patients and staff and expose them to infectious agents through cross-contamination.

How can cross-contamination risks be avoided?

One of the best ways to avoid microbial growth after reprocessing endoscopes is to use a drying and storage cabinet. These cabinets use forced air drying which removes all traces of moisture. Endoscopes can be stored in these cabinets for several days, depending on the type of cabinet used.

Can we ensure complete drying with pass-through cabinets?

To understand how to properly dry endoscopes, let's look at the Medistor HEPA Ventilated Pass-Through Endoscope Storage Cabinet.

Endoscopes are hung vertically in the cabinet to facilitate the drying process. Molded plastic hooks (without cavities) and guides allow the endoscopes to be stored individually and without contact with other endoscopes.

To dry the endoscopes, a continuous stream of pressurized HEPA-filtered air circulates through the cabinet. In addition, pressurized filtered air is cyclically circulated through each endoscope to achieve complete internal drying of the channels.

When a new endoscope is brought in, a five-minute (variable duration) stream of accentuated air is used to purge water from the endoscope to accelerate drying.

In addition, the air in the pass-through cabinet is continuously renewed to always ensure its quality.

Why use traceability?

When pass-through cabinets are equipped with an endoscope traceability system, a lot of information becomes available. The details provided include who used the endoscope, who reprocessed it, when it was disinfected, the drying and storage cycle and more.

The resulting data provides healthcare facilities with relevant information for management reporting, service improvement, instrument life and maintenance, training, etc.

Endoscope traceability has the advantage of preventing errors and optimizing the workflow critical to the safety of endoscopes and their users.

Traceability in the digital age

On the Medistor pass-through cabinet we used as an example, a digital display provides a visual interface that speeds up access to information relevant to endoscope traceability. A color-coding system identifies endoscopes according to their storage and drying time, thus promoting efficient rotation of these instruments.

In concrete terms, the interface indicates to users which endoscopes are ready for use, which are approaching their storage limit (yellow code) and which need to be reprocessed (red code).

In addition, the security of the endoscopes is ensured by the user interface that limits access to staff members. Thus, only medical personnel with rights can open the pass-through cabinet.

It can be concluded that pass-through cabinets have several advantages for patients, medical staff and care units. These drying and storage cabinets decrease the travel and transport time required for the staff treating the equipment they need.

As we have seen in the case of endoscopes, by reducing transportation, the risks of damaging them are reduced, especially since less handling of these instruments also reduces the risks of cross-contamination. Finally, the use of pass-through cabinets is safer for patients while facilitating the work of the nursing staff.

Would you like to know more about pass-through cabinets? Contact us for more information.