Classified as medical devices, surgical instruments require standardised and validated reprocessing. The procedure conventionally employed here is cleaning and disinfection in a washer/disinfector followed by sterilisation in an autoclave. Since the organic contamination of surgical instruments encountered in practice can be very pronounced, cleaning constitutes the basis for the subsequent reprocessing steps of disinfection and sterilisation. In this respect, blood represents the most common and hence the most important form of contamination.