Reducing Abnormal Culture Rates of Digestive Endoscopy in a Health Management Center

BACKGROUND Endoscopic evaluation plays an indispensable role in medical treatments designed to prevent, diagnose, and cure gastrointestinal disease. Surveillance culture monitoring may be useful in monitoring the outcome of reprocessing. PURPOSE In this project, microbiologic surveillance cultures were employed to improve the quality of flexible endoscope disinfection. RESOLUTION This project, implemented from February 1st, 2018 to February 28th, 2019, used several approaches to improve the positive culture rate. We redesigned and implemented the standard operating procedures for endoscope reprocessing, established an in-service training course, provided education materials on reprocessing, and installed a storage cabinet that custom-built to accommodate the endoscope. RESULTS The positive culture rate was reduced from 5.8% to 0%. CONCLUSIONS Endoscopy culturing is a useful method to assess the effectiveness of standard reprocessing procedures. The development of guidelines and skill practices should follow current, evidence-based practice and infection prevention principles, and related documents should be organized. We suggest regularly deploying quality-improvement techniques to improve performance and service delivery.