Mobile System Sterilizes Surgical Instruments in Low-Resource Settings

A Rice University team introduces its Sterile Box, a mobile, solar-powered facility to sterilize surgical instruments in low-resource settings. About a third of patients in low-resource settings suffer surgical-site infections, a number nine times higher than in developed countries. These infections are frequently the result of care providers using medical instruments that carry traces of microorganisms or biological material from previous patients. The Rice University station is built into a standard 20-foot steel shipping container that houses all the equipment necessary to prepare surgical instruments for safe reuse, including a water system for decontamination and a solar-powered autoclave for steam sterilization. Autoclaves are standard in modern hospitals but badly needed in low-resource settings.

Transcript

00:00:07 sterile box started as a shipping container here at the Aastra engineering design kitchen let's go the rice sterile box and we are a off-grid sterile processing unit for assisting health facilities hospitals and places where there's no power and there might be contaminated water so someone would bring the it tenses and through this window and there's a wall here so that

00:00:36 they can't come through on the person on the inside would be washing them there dump them in the sink do the initial rinse in this basin scrub them off in the sink and then rinse them all from this loss basin and then they go in the drying rack until the next step so by the time I spend wash already so we wrap the instruments in the sterilizer clock and put them inside the autoclave and

00:01:03 fill it with water water seal it and put it on the heater after about an hour we take it out I'll allow to cool for a while and then put it in the cabinet where it's ready to go for surgery we originally designed this not to use any power at all are very minimal power we morphed on to a solar PV solution and probably the big benefit of solar PV solution is we have some electricity for

00:01:30 non sterilization factors like charging cell phones and laptops so we think it's a big benefit in terms of water we now have a very simple kind of sand gravel filtration system and we think we can take surface water and run it through this filtration system and have fairly decent water in order to do the cleaning process I think what's been very interesting about the process of getting

00:01:59 to the sterile box as a design was that the original work done in this area by these researchers was to really look at simply making an autoclave make an autoclave that can be sustainably and what we found when we did that was that that only addressed part of the problem so what's particularly interesting about the sterile box is that it looks at the

00:02:22 entire system and it really has a chance I think to have an impact in a way that a single technology that only addresses cleaning surgical tools cannot possibly have the proof is going to be when we take it into the field and evaluate it and make sure that it works as intended