It's not one sterilizer going down.

 It's not one sterilizer going down.

It's the whole department. Nothing processed, nothing moving, for hours. Sometimes days.
And the room goes quiet in a way sterile processing rooms never are. Everyone standing there, waiting for someone to say what happens next.

Nobody does because nobody was ever told what to do or who decides.

So the improvising starts. Calls get made. Judgment calls happen with patient instruments on the line. And it works, mostly, which is exactly why nobody ever writes down what actually happened or turns it into a real, safe plan.

But a complete system failure doesn't really test the staff. It tests whether a plan existed before the day everything broke.

The most basic thing a department can have is a plan for the day everything stops. Who decides? Who gets called? What happens to in-cycle loads? When to stop? When to restart?

Some departments have one on paper. Most don't. The ones that don't meet their plan on the worst shift of their year.

Improvising through failure is not a plan.

I keep wondering: if your department went down tomorrow, completely, do you have a plan? Or would everyone have to figure it out together again?