Two Things That Are Checked From The Outside
An inspector cannot see whether steam reached the inside of a handpiece. They can see the seal on a pouch and they can ask for the cycle record.
Both are easy to get right with the correct equipment and surprisingly hard to defend without it.
What Makes A Seal Reliable
A seal fails when the temperature or the pressure varies along its length. A hand held iron varies with how fast the operator moves and how hard they press, so no two seals are the same and the weakest one is the one that opens in storage.
A thermal sealer applies a defined width at a controlled temperature. The Seal range produces a 12 mm sealing seam and preheats in two to three minutes, so the first pack of the day is sealed the same way as the last.
Handling Pouches Properly
Most seal failures start before the sealer. An instrument that is still damp, a pouch that is overfilled, or a sharp tip against the film will defeat a perfect seal.
Date the pouch as you seal it. Storage time then lives on the packet where anyone can read it rather than in someone's memory.
- Dry instruments completely before wrapping
- Do not overfill - the pouch needs to lie flat with the paper side visible
- Protect sharp tips so they cannot pierce the film in storage
- Date every pouch as it is sealed
- Load pouches flat in the chamber, paper side up, clear of the wall
The Cycle Record
Traceability means being able to answer, weeks later, whether a particular load ran a complete cycle. Handwritten logs answer that badly: they are written after the fact, by whoever was free, and they are the first thing an inspection questions.
Every Novo Pro writes cycle data to SD card or USB as the cycle runs. A built in automatic printer and an external printer are both available where a paper record is expected alongside the file.
Building A Habit That Survives Staff Turnover
The reason to automate both of these is that neither depends on who is on shift. A sealer produces the same seal for a new starter as for the practice manager, and a machine writing its own record does not forget on a busy day.
Archive the cycle files periodically so a lost or corrupted card does not take the year's records with it.
