In 2015 we shut down our Sterile Services decontamination and sterilisation department for essential maintenance and refurbishment and moved staff and production to 2 Steris facilities, one at Sheffield and one at Leicester. A year of planning went into making the process as pain free and uneventful as possible. This included having to have 1-2-1 meetings with staff, planning rotas, organising transport for staff and equipment, reviewing equipment volumes and purchasing new instruments, orientation visits to the Steris facilities, sharing of track and traceability databases and software, daily management of staff and the process and reinstating normal working following the shutdown. We plan to talk about the planning and preparation involved prior to the move, how we managed the process during the move and the current business contingency plans we have with Steris for managing peaks in workloads and infrastructure breakdowns.

Alison Gee and Fiona Roche, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust