Central Sterile Services (CSS) Technician Prometric Exam

STE5652 is the DHA code for the Central Sterile Services (CSS) Technician Prometric exam, and its published blueprint splits the paper across 8 areas: overview of the cssd and decontamination, principles of asepsis, microbiology and infection control, transportation of solid items to cssd and disinfection process, processing equipment and classification of surgical instrument types, preparation, packaging and labeling of instruments and devices, sterilization, maintenance, audit and quality control, flexible endoscope and dental instrument processing and use of indicators, load control and transportation from the cssd. That list is the syllabus — questions are written to those headings from 3 named reference texts, so revision that ignores it is revision spent on the wrong material.

The sitting is 150 multiple-choice questions in 3 hours — about 1.2 minutes per question — delivered on computer at a Prometric test centre. The 45% pass mark works out at roughly 68 correct answers out of 150. Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so an unanswered question is the only guaranteed zero on the paper.

The paper is sat by allied health professionals applying for a licence under the Central Sterile Services (CSS) Technician professional title. Technician-grade papers are weighted towards procedure, equipment and safety rather than diagnosis. In practice the exam is rarely the bottleneck: the regulator has to accept your qualification and experience, and Dataflow has to return primary source verification, before a booking slot exists at all. Start that paperwork alongside your revision rather than after it.

This bank holds 1,600 explained questions cut to the same headings as the STE5652 outline, each with written reasoning that also rules out the distractors. Retries are unlimited, and the timed mocks run at the real 150-question, 3-hour, 45%-to-pass settings — so the first time you sit this paper at full pace is not the morning it counts.

One body of content, seven regulators. DHA in Dubai, MOHAP across the UAE, SCFHS in Saudi Arabia, QCHP in Qatar, NHRA in Bahrain and OMSB in Oman all license the Central Sterile Services (CSS) Technician title off a Prometric-delivered MCQ paper, and the overlap between them is substantial. DOH runs its sitting through Pearson VUE instead. What differs is the pass mark, the classification tier they will grade you into, and how many attempts they allow — not the medicine.