USA
Visitors to the Healthcare Laundry Accreditation Council (HLAC) stand at APIC 2018 were keen to learn about the organisation's Accreditation Standards and its processed-based approach to preventing the contamination of healthcare textiles (HCTs).
APIC 2018, held June 13-15, was this year's annual conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. The conference was held at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The HLAC is a nonprofit organisation that inspects and accredits laundries processing textiles for hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities.
Staffing the HLAC stand were HLAC board members Joan Blanchard and Carol M. McLay and former HLAC board president John Scherberger.
“Traffic at APIC was the best I've ever seen,” Blanchard said. “Visitors had a lot of questions about our standards and how to access them at our website. Many were happily surprised to learn our standards document is available for free and that we offer additional resources, like our HLAC Standards Checklist, which is very useful to Infection Preventionists (IPs) when inspecting their own healthcare laundries.”
HLAC had on-hand numerous, relevant resources on the role of healthcare laundry in infection prevention. This included news of a newly available compendium, "Where Healthcare Laundry and Infection Prevention Meet" (registration required), which comprises four informative articles directed at IPs to raise their awareness of the role of healthcare laundry in infection prevention.
“Visitors showed interest in HLAC's inspection process, which is required before a healthcare laundry can receive accreditation,” said Blanchard. “They were impressed by the breadth and depth of the whole process.”
Visit HLAC's website for more information.
