If you own a hospital, health care facility or other business in the healthcare space and have medical grade silicone in your products, it’s imperative that they be cleaned properly. This will ensure sanitization and cleanliness in anything from operating rooms to triage units. Here’s how to clean and sanitize medical grade silicone.

What is Medical Grade Silicone?

These are silicones that have been tested and approved for biocompatibility and are allowed for use in any medical application. Si-Tech makes medical grade silicone for healthcare-industry clients of all types and sizes. It’s vital in our industry to create medical devices and tools with materials that are not only easily cleaned but also easily sterilized without breaking down or degrading.

Specifically, we use platinum-cured liquid silicone rubber (LSR) when designing medical liquid injection molding products. Why? It’s durable, versatile, can withstand a lot of wear and tear, and can be disinfected in a variety of ways.

What Can Medical Grade Silicone Be Used For?

Whether a hospital, doctor’s office, laboratory or urgent care facility, these spaces require a large amount of state of the art machines, devices and tools in order to provide proper care for patients. Once that equipment has been used, it has to be cleaned before it can be used again. Medical grade silicone can be used for the following:

• Device control keypads
• Rubber tubing
• Emergency defibrillator cases and kits
• Covers, gaskets and plugs
• Silicone rubber anti-slip handles for medical instruments

As these machines and devices come into contact with human bodies, all bacteria has to be wiped clean from surfaces – both before and after contact with bodily fluids, skin or anything else. You may be thinking: I thought medical grade rubber molding is created so that it does not encourage bacterial growth? You would be correct, but keep in mind that other materials used in the creation of medical devices and machines are able to breed bacteria readily.

This is why it’s helpful to be able to sterilize the entire device at once without the need to dismantle it for cleaning and then reassembled after.

Withstanding Sterilization

Did you know that platinum-cured rubber molding can withstand all types of sterilization processes, as necessary, on a regular basis?

You have to know which sterilization options apply to which components when initially designing the product, which is where our engineers come in. Those components have to withstand the sterilization procedure without degradation, and without being compromised Here’s what you can do for cleaning:

• Dry Heat: This approach kills bacteria, used in operating temperatures between -45 degrees F and 450 degrees F.
• Autoclave: This device uses steam to sterilize platinum-cured LSR. This in turn destroys microorganisms, and is great for surgical instruments, forceps and medical implants.
• Rubbing Alcohol: The most common methods of sterilizing silicone, rubbing alcohol will kill bacteria along with particles or dust.
• Gamma Radiation: May be used under certain circumstances.

Interested to know more? Get in touch with Si-Tech for more information on medical grade silicone.