‘The background people’: Sterilisation department crucial to Forté

Coral Dingemanse often gets funny looks when she tells people what she does for a living. 

As leader of the Sterile Services Department (SSD) at Forté Health Hospital, Coral finds herself correcting assumptions that she sterilises people and not instruments. 

“It’s a very unknown career. We’re kind of the background people but we play a crucial part in the operating theatre journey,” she says. 

The SSD is a significant part of Forté Health, seeing the theatre equipment and instruments go through a minimum three-hour turnaround process before they can be reused for another operation. 

“It's an important and lengthy process but nobody really thinks about what happens to the equipment, how it was cleaned and how they can be sure it’s sterile and not going to cause infection,” Coral says. 

After an operation, the instruments are collected and sorted into manual or automated cleaning processes. This may involve ultrasonic cleaners, automated instrument washers, and high-level disinfection units. The SSD team then inspects the instruments, assessing for cleanliness and functionality. 

“After this, we reassemble the equipment into the correct sets, check them off via an electronic tracking system and then pack and wrap these ready for sterilisation,” Coral says. 

“From here the equipment moves onto the sterilisation processes. Some instruments need to be sterilised in a steam steriliser while others need to be sterilised in low temperature hydrogen peroxide due to what they’re made of and following manufacturers recommendations.” 

Forté has introduced reusable containers for packing the sets of equipment into where possible, in line with its focus on sustainability. 

Coral is proud to say her team of six staff combined boasts more than 100 years of experience across a variety of hospitals. 

“It’s a very stable team. The hospital opened about 12 years ago and most of the team have been there that entire time.” 

Coral says good memory is crucial to the job and her team are often relied on by other hospital staff members as the experts when it comes to knowing all the theatre equipment and where each piece goes. 

“Everybody in the hospital has an important role to play and ours is no different. We have a lot of interaction with all the other departments because they’ll come to us if they can’t find something,” she says. 

Coral enjoys the flexibility of working at Forté Health, particularly not having to work weekends or late into the night, which is common for public hospital staff. 

“We work across a variety of shifts within the operating theatre environment which enables Forté Health in providing healthy work life balances for our people" she says. 

“Once you work in this environment you become very passionate about providing the best possible service for positive patient and staff outcomes. No two days are the same and every day is interesting and varied. It's a great place to work.”