The Backroom Fix Hospitals Didn’t See Coming

Hospitals turn to automated, off-site sterilization to ease strain on staff, space, and surgical capacity

23 Jan 2026

Sterile processing has long sat in hospital basements, out of sight and out of mind. Now it is edging into the boardroom. Faced with rising surgical volumes, thin staffing and cramped buildings, some health systems are reimagining how surgical instruments are cleaned, tracked and returned to theatres.

The shift is incremental but telling. In November 2025 Getinge, a maker of sterilisation equipment, announced a partnership with SteriPro International, which runs large off-site processing centres. Rather than expanding in-house departments, hospitals can send instruments to purpose-built facilities designed for scale, automation and tighter control. What was once an internal utility is becoming a service bought in.

The pressures are familiar. Demand for surgery keeps growing, yet experienced sterile-processing staff are hard to recruit and harder to keep. Many hospitals were built decades ago, when regulatory requirements were lighter and throughput lower. The result is a bottleneck created less by poor performance than by buildings and workflows that have failed to keep up.

Off-site models promise relief. Central facilities can standardise processes, invest in automation and use digital tracking to monitor instruments from decontamination to delivery. For hospitals the appeal is predictability: steadier turnaround times, clearer compliance and a way to add capacity without expensive construction.

The idea fits a broader trend in health care towards shared infrastructure. Laboratories and imaging services have long been centralised to spread costs and smooth demand. Sterile processing, though more sensitive, lends itself to the same logic. Regional hubs can balance volumes across hospitals, reduce duplicated equipment and provide spare capacity during surges.

Scepticism remains. Moving a mission-critical function beyond the hospital walls raises questions about transport, reliability and accountability. Any failure risks cancelled operations. Proponents argue that such risks can be managed through tight service agreements, redundancy and real-time traceability. The emphasis, they say, is shifting from owning equipment to securing guaranteed quality.

None of this amounts to a revolution. Most hospitals will keep some processing on site. But the direction is clear. As systems search for resilience under sustained pressure, sterile processing is being recast as an operational lever, not just a support task. Sending it off site is becoming a strategy rather than a stopgap.