09/02/2026
Managed Service Providers (MSP) and Vendor Management Systems (VMS) have become a common travel staffing solution for hospitals, but many are designed primarily around nursing and other licensed clinical roles. This model often fails to account for the specialized demands of sterile processing. When SPD roles are treated as low-cost, non-revenue-generating positions and routed through general staffing channels, compensation, candidate quality, and departmental performance can suffer. Sterile processing, like finance, protects revenue by supporting safe, efficient operations. Experienced SPD professionals, clear processes, KPIs, performance metrics, and SOPs help keep departments survey-ready, improve patient safety, reduce surgical delays, and increase surgical capacity—priorities that should matter to hospital executives, perioperative leaders, and infection prevention teams.
The Structural Problem
The core issue is that hospital staffing models often prioritize roles viewed as direct revenue generators or those with advanced degree and licensure requirements. Strong nursing teams are essential, but sterile processing teams are equally critical to patient safety, surgical outcomes, and operating room performance. Despite the responsibility SPD professionals carry—delivering accurate, complete, properly inspected, and sterile surgical trays—certification is not required in many states, and investment in recruitment, training, and retention often remains insufficient.
Consequences for Operations and Patient Safety
· An overworked, overwhelmed, under-resourced and underpaid sterile processing workforce
· Dissatisfied surgeons and operating room teams receiving incomplete or incorrect surgical trays
· Delayed or rescheduled procedures caused by contaminated instruments or missing items
· Higher infection risk when improperly sanitized instruments reach the operating room or when staff must reopen a sterile environment to retrieve missing tools
· Greater exposure to surgical site infections, reputational harm, and costly litigation
· Chronic unfilled FTEs
· A workforce in which nearly 50% of employees experience at least one significant workplace injury.
Research underscores the operational and financial impact. A study published in the April 2024 issue of BMC Surgery by Dr. Peter Nichol found that 87% of tray errors were tied to visualization failures, including inspection, identification, and functional checks. The study estimated annual lost charges from instrument-related surgical delays at $6.7 million to $9.4 million per hospitalacross a 3-hospital system.
This breaks down to approximately $200,000 per operating room each year. Moab has noted that SPD errors are often not formally reported, indicating that the actual extent of the problem is likely far greater than documented data suggests.
Potential Solutions
A practical solution is to invest in qualified, certified sterile processing professionals, including interim or travel staff when needed. Hospitals should consider SPD staffing outside the standard MSP model and partner with specialized perioperative staffing firms that understand the clinical, operational, and financial importance of high-quality surgical support services.
Experienced interim SPD leaders can protect surgical revenue by strengthening processes, training staff, tracking KPIs, and maintaining consistent self-auditing. Process optimization consultants can also reduce department strain by streamlining trays, removing unused instruments, lowering reprocessing volume, and increasing surgical capacity. Even a few additional procedures per week can generate significant annual revenue.
For example, Dr. Nichol observed that across four orthopedic surgeons performing the same hip procedure each surgeon used trays with only 5% to 10% variation. Yet there was so much variation surgeon-to-surgeon that creating one standardized set of trays for all 4 would only reduce the instrument volume for the procedure by 8-10%. On the other hand, customizing trays to each surgeon’s use patterns could eliminate 67% of the instruments.
When one considers that 35% of all trays in the national surgical fleet are estimated to service orthopedic cases and only 30% of the instruments are used off any of those trays in any given case, the opportunities for cost savings in reprocessing in this field alone are staggering. Similar optimization efforts can reduce reprocessing workload across other high-volume specialties and support additional surgical volume.
Automation and AI tools may eventually help assemble surgical trays more accurately and support SPD technicians through training and quality control. However, these technologies often require capital investment that sterile processing departments struggle to secure because they are still undervalued within hospital budgeting models.
Ultimately, hospitals that value professional sterile processing staff, invest in process improvement, and maintain ongoing education and quality monitoring are better positioned to reduce turnover, improve surgical throughput, protect patients, and strengthen revenue. Moving away from generic MSP models and toward specialized surgical support partners can directly improve operational performance while reducing the risk of preventable delays, errors, and financial loss.
