Endoscope drying effectiveness, microbial levels in automated drying vs standard storage cabinets

Editor's Note

An automated drying and storage cabinet with forced filtered air is advantageous for rapid drying of endoscope internal and external surfaces and reducing the risk of microbial growth after reprocessing, this study finds.

Using the automated drying cabinet, internal channels of all bronchoscopes, colonoscopes, and duodenoscopes studied were dry at 1 hour and external surfaces were dry at 3 hours.

With the standard storage cabinet, there was still residual fluid in the internal surfaces at 24 hours, and external surfaces were dry at 24 hours.

The standard cabinet allowed an average rate of colony forming unit growth per hour of 8.1x10⁶ for bronchoscopes, 8.3x10⁶ for colonoscopes, and 7.0x10⁷ for duodenoscopes.

The automated cabinet resulted in an average rate of colony forming unit growth per hour of 28.4 for bronchoscopes, -35.8 for colonoscopes, and -200.2 for duodenoscopes.