Innovative mobile Central Sterile Services Department unit provides alternative capacity during renovation

Medical Centre Leeuwarden is refurbishing the Central Sterile Services Department (CSSD) in which all reusable instruments used in its surgical procedures are intensively cleaned, disinfected and sterilised. A mobile CSSD, designed and built by Vanguard Healthcare Solutions, will meet the requirement for sterile services while the hospital's CSSD is closed, ensuring the medical equipment used in surgery at the hospital continues to be processed and prepared on-site.

The Vanguard mobile CSSD unit has been designed to provide replacement capacity for the cleaning, sterilising and packaging of surgical instruments.

The unit is fully equipped, self-sufficient, and provides floorspace of 120 m². It includes a precleaning station with a built-in ultrasonic cleaner, washer disinfectors and steam sterilisers, a water treatment installation, compressed air supply, an electronic data centre and HEPA filtered air treatment installation.

Medical Centre Leeuwarden, a large hospital in the Netherlands, is one of the country’s major top clinical centres, providing 668 beds and offering secondary and tertiary care in clinical specialities including pulmonology, cardiovascular surgery and bariatric surgery. It serves a population of more than 250,000 people.

After the successful completion of various tests and validations, the Vanguard mobile CSSD unit was ready for use on April 22nd and is due to be in place at the hospital for between six and eight weeks. The unit has been designed to ensure speedy deployment, set-up and, following completion of the project, extraction from hospital sites.

Getinge is providing the refurbishment services and Henk Driebergen, Sales Manager, Infection Control, Benelux, commented “The partnership with Vanguard enables us to provide hospitals with a unique solution. The mobile CSSD is a turnkey solution enabling high speed of installation and commissioning."

Steve Peak, Delivery and Development Director at Vanguard, said: “We’re delighted to be working alongside Getinge to provide our stand-alone sterilisation unit at the Medical Centre Leeuwarden.

“Vanguard developed the CSSD unit to provide a mobile, yet fully-integrated solution for hospitals who are under-going refurbishment or who require additional capacity for sterilisation of surgical equipment, using the very best in equipment and design to ensure the highest of quality.

“We’ve had fantastic feedback from the hospital on the speed with which the unit was delivered and installed and we’re very much looking forward to working with the team there and Getinge on this exciting project.”