Sterilizers & Autoclaves News

PARKERSBURG - Camden-Clark Memorial Hospital will use around 10 million gallons of water less a year through conservation and contracting services, hospital officials said.

Steve Cockerham, director of engineering at the hospital explained that during the last year, most of the conservation of water is done in the laundry department. All the laundry labor was transferred to laundry services to a private contractor. This simple transfer of work would save about 9 million gallons a year.

Other steps include retrofitting equipment, such as water flow controllers to reduce the overflow of water in the sterilizers. Limiting how often the boilers are blown off to remove impurities also saves considerable amount of water.

The sterilizers, which generally run around the clock, had required a constant flow of water. To avoid overflows, timers were installed to control the flow. This would save 1.4 million gallons a year. That’s little more than $8,000. The installation has already paid for itself. The cost of the equipment and the installation charged $3,600.

Cockerham accepted that the good thing besides the savings is we are not using the water. To remove impurities from the boilers, releasing steam blows off the material. This process is called “blow down”. The boilers are needed to be on constant blow down for them to function properly. Using chemicals to the water to consolidate the impurities cuts blow down process to once in a day. It saves about 150,000 gallons a day.

Camden-Clark averages 40 million gallons of water a year at a cost of about $232,000, spokesman Greg Smith said. Conservation and outsourcing will save about 25 percent in both usage and cost. This would help us to look at ecological and cost savings that would keep the cost of health care lower.

Jill Parsons, director of marketing and community relations at St. Joseph hospital says that they buy equipment with cost savings features, such as sterilizers with flow control valves, which use the least natural resources for the most benefit.

Camden-Clark from April 2002 to March 2003 used 41.6 million gallons of water, according to documents filed with the Parkersburg Utility Board. The hospital used 36.7 million from April 2003 to March 2004 after the water conservation project is taken up. While on the other hand, St. Joseph’s usage was 47.3 million gallons from April 2002 to March 2003 and 48.8 million from April 2003 to March 2004. The comparisons were for the main hospital facilities and physicians office complexes.

According to Clarence Cox, utility board manager, Conservation is good, but there’s another aspect to consider. Like so many things in life, it’s a two-edge sword. The institution is spending and using less water, increasing available capacity of the treatment system in the community, but the utility board loses revenue by the same scale. This would be more beneficial to the utility board if these steps were adopted when there was a water shortage.

Cockerham’s job as engineering director has come up with methods to save such operational costs. He has been more successful in implementing revolutionary ideas, which are beneficiary to the hospital in terms of economy, but also promote the society in some way or the other. He says, “Some are common sense”.

The Onslow County Hospital Authority is still years away from beginning construction of a 24,000-square-foot emergency department, a 26,000-square-foot surgical suite as well as new space for central sterile supply and endoscopy that will be located behind the existing hospital on Memorial Drive.

The board needs to hire a construction manager soon to keep the process moving forward. Bruce Arneill and David Neal of SLAM Collaborative, the hospital’s architectural firm, John Worrell, the Hospital Authority’s director facility services; and Herb Stanford of Stanford White Engineering serve on the committee that looked at construction manager applicants.

The committee looked for companies that had experience working with Housing and Urban Development in North Carolina and with health-care facility construction. Danny Waller, senior vice president of support services said that, the authority received information from 26 groups interested in the construction manager position and narrowed the list to 11 after requesting qualifications.

A committee interviewed five candidates for the position this week and a recommendation was made to the authority that it considered hiring Bovis Lend Lease Inc. of Charlotte to do the job.

At its meeting on Thursday, the Hospital Authorities didn’t want to finalize the decision about the construction manager. The group wants Bovis Lend Lease and Rogers Building Inc. of Charlotte to give presentations at the authority’s building and planning committee and finance committee meetings next month, who will then make a recommendation to the full authority.

The construction manager won’t just be responsible for overseeing the building of the facility. They take the architectural schematics and drawings and do pre-construction estimates as to how much will it cost to build the project. They help with the development of bids and the analysis of bids. They also select subcontractors. They provide a construction superintendent. They make sure the work that is being done follows infection control standards.

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Trust, London, holds stage for new state-of-the-art Pharmacy Manufacturing Unit (PMU). Its main features are sophisticated Water for Injection (WFI) and Clean Steam generation systems for cleaning and sterilization purposes.

The system is designed engineered and commissioned by specialist consultants Honeyman Group Ltd., which provided initial consultancy to MEH, design, supervisory implementation, writing of protocols, validation and final commissioning. System software was designed, tested and built in accordance with the GAMP3 Guide For Validation of Automated Systems in Pharmaceutical Manufacture and also with the requirements of FDA 21CFR Part 11 with respect to electronic records.

It uses a Eurotherm T800 based control solution for all supervisory control functions. The complex system consists of three packaged plants, operating independently with overall supervisory control architecture. In the first plant, reverse osmosis filters and de-ionization processes produce purified water. This is stored as feed water for two additional processes, clean steam generation and distillation for WFI. The entire process is predominantly automated and thus requires minimal operator intervention.

The products of the system are used for a variety of manufacturing, cleaning and sterilizing purposes. WFI is used for production, a number of equipment washing machines and cleaning in place (CIP) tasks, while Clean Steam is used for high temperature autoclaves and steam in place (SIP) purposes.

The three individual packaged plants are self-contained modules with integral local control systems, hand shaking locally and communicating with the central control panel. A number of independent local control panels are also provided for control of dispensing at WFI & Clean Steam points-of-use. The central control panel is also hard wired into the Building Management System (BMS) for soliciting an operator response to alarm conditions.
The Eurotherm T800 at the central control panel is used to execute across-network control operations. Standard features of the T800 controller include a clear touch screen display for screen navigation and execution of operator commands, batch management to ISA-S88, accurate continuous and sequential control, support for Modbus and Profibus, as well as time synchronization.

In this particular application, the controller provides process mimics, bar-graph displays, historic trends, alarm and event logs, keeping the operator fully informed of system status. Key issues in specifying the T800 solution for this WFI/CS system was Honeyman’s clear intention for creating tamper-proof records of key parameters within the fundamental analogue processes synchronized by continuous control. It is operated here in conjunction with five eight-way Eurotherm 2500 I/O controllers.

The five panel-mounted 2500 controllers are used primarily for data acquisition purposes, interconnected with T800 Visual Supervisor via an open ‘Profibus DP’ network. 2500 configuration is achieved using proprietary Eurotherm ‘iTools’ software. Three of the 2500s are mounted with the central control panel, the remaining two operating remotely at local control panels.

The T800 Visual Supervisor logs process data continuously on flash memory for temporary storage, and an integral 1.44 MB diskette for long-term storage with read only restrictions, in a proprietary tamper proof binary format. Process values, events and alarms and trending data are logged once every minute. In terms of access control, the T800 provides four levels of password-protected access to authorized personnel only. A time lock facility ensures that access is cancelled and locked after 15 minutes of operator inactivity.

Roger Newton, Honeyman Project Manager for the MEH system, states that the T800 based control solution was the best possible for both analogue and digital parameters. We have therefore been able get exceptional functionality into compact, cost-effective package. Together with the high level of cooperation provided by Eurotherm’s technical people, made this an obvious solution, which not only meets the current needs of the system but has the flexibility to meet future needs as well.