HLAC monitoring webinar now available online
US/INTERNATIONAL
The Healthcare Laundry Accreditation Council (HLAC) is making available online the full audio/video presentation of its recent webinar, "How Monitoring Keeps Your Laundry Processes Effective, On Target and Safe”. The one-hour webinar, which was held 14 August, is available on HLAC's website and also on YouTube.
"Our webinar was a big hit, we're happy to report," said HLAC Executive Director Regina A. Baras. "We had a robust and diverse turnout that included a cross section of professionals from the healthcare and laundry industries. Clearly, in these times, accountable individuals are looking for new solutions to improve their healthcare laundry processes."
The online webinar includes a discussion of the need for process monitoring; common contamination scenarios; the science of process monitoring; the importance of testing; and an HLAC-accredited laundry's experience with newly available process-monitoring tools.
The Healthcare Laundry Accreditation Council (HLAC) is a nonprofit organization formed for the purpose of inspecting and accrediting laundries processing healthcare textiles for hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities.
Webinar presenters include:
· Gregory Gicewicz, President/CEO, Sterile Surgical Systems, Tumwater, Washington
· Lumey Gamboa, COO, Bay Linen Inc., Clearwater, Florida
· Michael Loewenstein, VP of Quality & Scientific Consulting, Q Laboratories LLC, Cincinnati, Ohio
· Dane Brooks, Project Manager, Q Laboratories, LLC, Cincinnati, Ohio
The webinar focuses on proprietary extraction techniques designed to recover and quantify the most accurate representation of bioburden load on laundry media: on hard surfaces, in the air, on linen, in the water, and on employee hands.
During the presentation, Bay Linen's Lumey Gamboa discusses her laundry's use of HLAC's new Laundry Process Monitoring Toolkit (PMTK). "We chose to participate in the HLAC program as a response to our customers' needs for more information about our processes, as a means to having the data to monitor the outcome of these processes, and to be proactive in reacting to changes that may be necessary to continue meeting their expectations," she said.
HLAC's PMTK was introduced last summer. At the time of its introduction, Gicewicz said: "PMTK was a breakthrough innovation at the time of its introduction, and, arguably, its significance is even more apparent in today's guarded environment." Gicewicz is a former HLAC board president and current board member who headed the committee that developed the toolkit on behalf of HLAC.
About HLAC
The Healthcare Laundry Accreditation Council (HLAC) is a nonprofit organisation formed for the purpose of inspecting and accrediting laundries processing healthcare textiles for hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities. Visit www.hlacnet.org and on Twitter @NewsHlac
