CSC Annual Scientific Meeting preview
Risk and revolution in decontamination
The theme of the Central Sterilisation Club (CSC) Annual Scientific Meeting 2025 is: ‘Risk and Revolution’. The CSC’s Mike Simmons and John Prendergast ask the question: What can Elon Musk teach the decontamination community?
Elon Musk is a bit like Marmite but love him or hate him it is fascinating to see how he has engendered a culture of “fail fast, learn faster” within the development of SpaceX, which he established in 2002. SpaceX celebrates both failures and successes, recognising each offers valuable learning opportunities. By capturing both, they develop a culture of openness, transparency, and accountability, which encourages engineers to take risks and experiment without fear of punishment. This in turn leads to a quicker, innovative and creative workplace. Allowing rockets to explode because he can
afford to is a bit like most of us being able to afford a second ice-cream for a distressed child when they dropped the first. It needs personal commitment, which in the case of the world’s richest man, can amount to millions if not billions of dollars. Musk is recognised as a
disrupter, shining light on problems in different ways. In 2017, he founded TBC – The Boring Company, largely, it seems, out of personal frustrations with the Los Angeles traffic. Instead of being viewed as a two-dimensional system, he felt that the way to allow greater freedom of movement for vehicles would be to link elements of the network through tunnels. His disruptive thinking is making inroads to a problem, while his engineers are improving on existing tunnelling machines, and reaching cutting speeds previously unheard of. The question for healthcare in general, and decontamination in particular, is “How can we embrace risk and revolutionise our efforts in decontamination?” Ultimately, if we are able to look at things differently, non-traditional solutions may become apparent. There is an opportunity to look outside our narrow fields and ask whether what is being done in a different field can be extrapolated to solve our own problems.
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www.clinicalservicesjournal.com I March 2025
The Central Sterilising Club looks forward to holding its Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) within the historic city of Chester on 14-15 April 2025 and offers you the opportunity to step off
the conveyor belt of healthcare for a couple of days and meet with friends and colleagues and take time-out to share difficulties and solutions. The theme for this year’s ASM is ‘Risk
and Revolution,’ and considers whether improvements we have traditionally made, need to be revolutionised. Can we embrace risk as being a legitimate avenue for action with scope for fundamental change, and revolutionise the delivery of efficient solutions within the decontamination and infection prevention and control field? As always, the committee has looked to put a multi-disciplinary programme together to provoke discussion, learning and raise awareness. Opening our proceedings this year will be the
eponymous Kelsey Lecture. Established in 1980 through a donation generously provided by Dr. Jos Kelsey, the bequest enables a guest lecturer
of international reputation to be invited to speak at the CSC Conference annually. This year’s Kelsey Lecturer is Sulisti Holmes, who brings a wealth of practical experience to our event. Her role within NHS Assure (Scotland) means she is well respected, not only in the UK, but also across Europe and many areas around the World. Sulisti will be highlighting the importance of a transparent culture, escalating, and reporting medical device incidents to ensure a ‘lesson learnt’ culture. We also investigate theatre culture and
behaviour and will debate the question: are we wasting time decontaminating devices to a high standard, when theatres may not share the same level of diligence? We have one session dedicated to such an area and look at how important ventilation services are to ensure contamination rates are minimised within such an environment. Manual cleaning of flexible endoscopes
has always been an area for variability. Are there systems on the market today to provide greater assurance? Are these systems going to revolutionise the decontamination life
Brigitte -
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