Patient Experience
The Hospital Sterile Services Unit (HSSU) is St James’s Hospital’s centralised unit dedicated to the decontamination of reusable invasive medical devices.
The Hospital Sterile Services Unit (HSSU) provides sterile surgical instrumentation to all inpatient and day patient operating theatres, wards and outpatient departments across the hospital.
In 2019, the HSSU re-processed over 40,000 sterile surgical instrument sets. The HSSU was the pilot site for what has become the National Surgical Instrument Track & Trace System, an international healthcare award-winning project.
This system allows for a higher level of quality assurance in enabling an electronic link between instruments used in surgery, to each stage of the decontamination process. It also links the instruments to each individual patient by using globally unique GS1 barcodes.