The importance of paper records and their preservation period in a Central Sterile Supply Department: An experience from a oncology center in eastern India

Everywhere recordkeeping is very essential for future need. This may be required for any audit purposes, legal issues and forgetting any incident. Record keeping is a specialized area in every hospital that is handled by specialized medical records officer for proper management of all important documents for long time preservation purposes.In this article there are various important healthcare sterilization related paper records have been discussed for documentation and preservation purposes. Though several articles on ‘retention of medical records’ have already been published worldwide but exclusively sterilization related records and their cause of preservation have not been discussed as such.The purpose of the article is to highlight only the essential CSSD paper records and their preservation policy so that this certainly guides to every CSSD in-charge and hospital authority for making a standard guideline of retaining sterilization records in their institution. Keywords: Purpose of recordkeeping, Functions of CSSD, Types of CSSD records, Preservation period, Consequence of unnecessary documentatio