Every surgical instrument that enters an operating room — every retractor, every clamp, every laparoscopic port, every robotic arm component — has been prepared for that moment by a sterile processing technician. Before the surgeon makes the first incision, before the scrub tech opens the first tray, before the circulator confirms the instrument count, a

At some point, most hospitals dealing with chronic sterile processing staffing gaps make the same decision: call the agency, bring in a travel tech, and get the department back to functional capacity. The urgency is understandable. Open positions in the SPD ripple directly into OR throughput, and no perioperative director wants to manage case delays

The operating room gets most of the attention when hospitals evaluate surgical performance. Surgeon satisfaction surveys, OR utilization metrics, first-case on-time starts, turnover times — these are the numbers that appear on executive dashboards and drive perioperative strategy conversations. But experienced surgical services leaders know that the performance of the operating room is downstream of

In the debate over how hospitals should organize their instrument reprocessing operations, the evidence has largely settled on one side. Centralized sterile processing — consolidating all reprocessing activity through a dedicated, professionally staffed central sterile processing department — consistently outperforms decentralized and point-of-use reprocessing models on the metrics that matter most: infection prevention outcomes, regulatory