I’ve been involved for 34 years in the field of sterilization within the Pharmaceutical, Biotech and Healthcare industries.  During this time period I have specialised in moist heat sterilization; stumbling into it many years ago, almost by accident.  As an engineer first getting involved in this field a long time ago, ‘the autoclave and sterilization process’ fascinated me.

Although at the time I knew very little about this subject, my background had been in steam, pneumatics, hydraulics, fluidics, controls and a cross-platform of mechanical engineering.  Back in those early days I had recently joined the National Health Service (NHS) in England, where I was given responsibility to look after these ‘things’ called autoclaves.  As I got heavily involved I became ‘hungry’ to know more.  It became increasingly clear to me that not many others had the same interest as me, but no matter.  I would shadow the contract service and commissioning technicians to learn as much as I could from them; although it became abundantly clear that their knowledge of the sterilization process, even on their own equipment was limited.  So over the next few years I purposed to learn (at many times lying on my back underneath these, at times, complex pieces of equipment), and determined to understand as much as I could.

 

Over the next 9 years in the NHS, through my time in the Area and then Regional Authorities, I learnt a lot about the moist heat, dry heat, depyrogenation, low temperature steam and formaldehyde processes etc. before moving into the Pharmaceutical and Biotech industry.