Grafton Base Hospital, Australia

The need

Grafton Base Hospital is a major rural community hospital. It is the only hospital to provide surgical services in the Clarence Valley, an area covering 10,441 square kilometres and population of over 50,000 people. The local, and not so local, community depend on the surgical services of this hospital to receive their emergency and elective treatment.

The Grafton Base Hospital CSSD suffered catastrophic failure. Sterilisation services were no longer able to be run on site. In the interim, nurses and hospital support staff would drive the instruments, after a long day of lists, to the closest hospital for sterilisation – this was over 1.5 hours away.

The need to repair the CSSD triggered a refurbishment project to bring the facility up to AS4187 standards. This project was planned to last several months.

The plan

Working together with Q-bital, hospital management called to request a mobile CSSD and Q-bital delivered it to site within 5 days. This self-contained solution would match the sterilisation capabilities of Grafton Base Hospital and ensure timely access to instruments through high periods of surgical demand. A service which was severely constrained with offsite surgical processing.

The standalone facility was placed as close to the hospital as possible – with AS4187 compliant lockable transport carts used to transfer instruments between rooms and the mobile CSSD.

The solution

Grafton Base Hospital were able to continue to provide the high level of hospital care expected by the residents of Clarence Valley. With onsite sterilisation ongoing through the CSSD repairs and upgrades, the hospital maintained their elective and emergency surgical capability.  They were able to turn around instruments which had become non-sterile in a timely fashion and reduced potential damage to instruments during those 3-hour return journeys to Coffs Harbour or Lismore Base hospitals.

The hospital carried out the required repair and refurbishment to their CSSD with our AS4187 compliant mobile CSSD.  Q-bital removed the facility after 23 weeks.