Your CRCST date is set. Between now and then: 505 questions with every option explained, three timed 110-question practice exams, a 12-day plan built on the reprocessing workflow. No login, no expiry.
We built this the way a sterile processing educator runs a department in-service, not the way a shelf gets filled. HSPA delivers 150 items in three hours at a Prometric center. Only 125 of them count; the other 25 are unscored pretest items, and you cannot tell which is which. HSPA reports a result rather than a raw number, and publishes no fixed cut. Our twelve days are organised by workflow rather than by the outline's seven sections. Read this book against HSPA's published content outline, revised November 2023. We would rather you did.
What's inside
A 25-question diagnostic before you touch a tray. It finds the step in the workflow that is costing you before you spend an evening in the wrong place.
505 questions, every option explained. Twelve daily quizzes, two cumulative reviews that pull earlier days back in, and three timed papers at the end.
Three timed practice exams at 110 questions. Long enough to teach you what your attention does in the second hour.
The workflow end to end: point-of-use treatment and transport, manual and mechanical cleaning, high-level disinfection and endoscope reprocessing, inspection and assembly, packaging, sterile storage, distribution. The exam asks what must be true at each of those steps.
Sterilization taken apart: steam principles and cycle types, ethylene oxide, vaporized hydrogen peroxide, ozone. Then the mechanical, chemical and biological monitoring that decides whether a load goes out.
Figures drawn from the department: the decontamination-to-sterile workflow, the sterilization cycle, packaging methods side by side, the indicator hierarchy, storage clearances. Maybe you have already worked a question bank that handed you the answer and moved on. Give it three evenings. If the diagnostic tells you nothing about your weakest step, put it down. An hour is all it cost.
Three kinds of reader use this book. A new technician working toward the credential. Department staff sitting the exam after on-the-job training. Someone crossing from surgical services who wants a plan that ends. If decontamination is already your day job, start at Day 5.
Day 9 is monitoring and quality assurance, and it is dry. Work through it and you'll see why a load gets held. Downloaded once, yours to keep.
— The Passmark Publishing Team
An independent study guide from Passmark Publishing. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the Healthcare Sterile Processing Association. HSPA and CRCST are trademarks of the Healthcare Sterile Processing Association. For exam preparation only; not medical advice, and no substitute for your department's policies or a manufacturer's instructions for use.
Your CRCST date is set. Between now and then: 505 questions with every option explained, three timed 110-question practice exams, a 12-day plan built on the reprocessing workflow. No login, no expiry.
We built this the way a sterile processing educator runs a department in-service, not the way ...