Cleaning and Disinfecting Imaging Equipment

Spaulding's three classes

The Spaulding classification, used by the CDC, decides how clean an item must be by what it touches. Critical items enter sterile tissue or the bloodstream, such as needles, catheters and biopsy instruments. They must be sterile. Semicritical items touch mucous membranes or broken skin, such as endoscopes and endocavity probes. They need at least high-level disinfection. Noncritical items touch only intact skin, such as the x-ray table. They need low-level or intermediate-level disinfection. The levels differ in what they kill. Low-level kills most bacteria and some viruses and fungi. Intermediate-level adds tuberculosis, so it is called tuberculocidal. High-level kills all microbes except large numbers of bacterial spores. Sterilization kills everything, spores included.