ASP SUMMIT 2025 Webinar 3 "Flexible Endoscope Decontamination: The challenge of biofilms!"

ASP SUMMIT 2025 Webinar 3 "Flexible Endoscope Decontamination: The challenge of biofilms!" SYNOPSIS: Endoscope reprocessing is a challenge for healthcare professionals and institutions. In the past years there has been several references to outbreaks which the root cause was related with limitations of the endoscope decontamination. In this webinar we will discuss the current gaps in flexible endoscope decontamination, the inadequacy of sampling and test methods for biofilm, the risk of biofilm, the potential of biofilm accumulation in flexible endoscopes, and what can or should we do to combat this. We start with an overview of the 3 areas (decontamination processes, testing and what are biofilms) we then look to what can we do to improve these processes to give greater assurance to our patients, the main take home point is that current practice is not enough, sterilisation should be adopted and we look at real world studies showing why gas plasma is the practical solution to the challenges presented. Topics: 1- Endoscope decontamination Overview 2- Endoscope Decontamination assurance tests 3- Biofilms the challenge for endoscopes reprocessing 4- Endoscope reprocessing The future