I am looking for information on steam sterilization of wooden tongue depressors. We use them in our facility to go through our washer/decontaminator to identify trays, separate instruments, and broken items. On occasion, a tongue depressor slips through and is sterilized with a tray, resulting in the OR tearing down the whole room because of contamination.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have been looking online for 2 days trying to find information but I can't find what I am looking for.

Hi Jamie

To answer your question it would be helpful to know the arguments of the OR tearing down the whole room because of contamination when found a wood tongue depressor in a set.
Nonetheless, wood products can be sterilized be steam, but they can cause problems. Heat drives lignocelluloses (lignin) resin out of the wood's pulp during the sterilization process. This resin may condense onto other instrument and cause adverse reaction by conduct to patient's body tissues. An other problems appears if wood repeatedly goes through steam sterilization: the wood dries out and absorbs moisture from saturated steam- steam becomes superheated and loses some of its sterilizing power. This could affect the sterility of other items in the set.
If all this also happens through a single tongue depressor, I don't know. But your tongue depressor gone through the washing/decontamination process followed by a sterilization cycle is quite a stress and could result in fibre shedding. Generally, the use and sterilization of wooden materials should be minimized and repeated sterilization avoided.
In your situation I would follow the old saying "when in doubt, throw it out". I am sure you can find a solution convenient for everyone. If you like to keep your system think of replacing the tongue depressors with some kind of light metal- or plastic plats?

Kind regards
Josy Holdener