Elevating the Standard of Care in Endoscope Reprocessing: Challenges & Solutions

"Procedural endoscopy is rapidly evolving from a largely visual diagnostic tool into full-scale endoluminal surgery, where flexible scopes become operative platforms for cutting, coagulating, stenting, and extracting across the gastrointestinal, pulmonary, and urologic tracts. This therapeutic leap dramatically expands tissue contact, routinely breaches the vascular compartment, and magnifies the consequences of residual contamination. Recent outbreaks—many involving multidrug-resistant organisms—linked to duodenoscopes, bronchoscopes, and ureteroscopes highlight the gap between current reprocessing practices and the sterility assurance demanded by surgical interventions.

This presentation reframes scope reprocessing through a surgical lens and examines four critical themes.
1. Contamination Challenges & Outbreak History: a concise review of published failures that propelled regulatory and industry responses.
2. Reclassification to “critical” devices under Spalding’s paradigm: why traditional “semi-critical” high-level disinfection is no longer appropriate for endoluminal surgery.
3. Infection Surveillance & Analytics: the imperative for tracking of scope usage, reprocessing cycles, and post-procedure infection rates to drive patient safety.
4. Pathways to Safer Therapy: accelerating adoption of advanced methods to elevate margin of safety alongside with proper cleaning can elevate the standard of care as minimally invasive endoscope surgery progresses..

By positioning endoscope reprocessing within the broader transformation toward endoluminal surgery, this session provides clinicians, infection-prevention teams, and administrators with actionable strategies to align safety practices with the surgical capabilities now delivered through the flexible endoscope."