Royal Hobart Hospital Robots

Royal Hobart Hospital Central Sterilising Department

Staff working in the Royal Hobart Hospital’s Central Sterilising Department (CSD) have a safer, healthier workplace with an ergonomically designed new unit and Australia’s first CSD robot.

Since mid-June, K-Block’s new CSD has been cleaning, disinfecting and sterilising reusable medical instruments and equipment.

Automated vehicles support staff by delivering around 100,000 packed hospital instrument trays to the new sterilisers. This helps to reduce staff injury by removing the need for repetitious lifting.

This is the first time any hospital in Australia has used the robot.

Staff health and safety has been at the forefront of the CSD design which includes height-adjustable sinks and workstations.

The modern CSD has significantly more space than the old unit and has equipment new to the Royal Hobart Hospital including an automated chemical dosing system, de-boxing area, dedicated state-ofthe-art loan-set equipment room and electronic instrument tracker.

CSD is an infection-controlled, restricted area in K-Block Level 5.

The CSD supports the existing nine operating theatres and inpatient and outpatient services in the RHH and five new operating theatres, procedure room, angiography and cardiac cath lab in K-Block, along with several other health facilities in Hobart.

The CSD has three precincts: the dirty area that includes the decontamination areas, washers and dryers; the clean area which includes storage, assembly areas, sterilisers; and the cooling and sterile stock area.

The Lynx robotic automated guided vehicle robot was developed by Omron in conjunction with Atherton.

The partnership of medical manufacturers/ suppliers Atherton and Device Technologies Australia delivered $2.8 million in new CSD equipment including two robots, for K-Block.