Industry Roundtable: Healthcare Laundry

20 September 2018


USA

The Healthcare Laundry Accreditation Council (HLAC) and the Textile Rental Services Association (TRSA) were invited to address pertinent issues in healthcare laundry relating to infection prevention and control in the September edition of Infection Control Today (ICT).

In “Industry Roundtable: Healthcare Laundry (13 Sept) Gregory Gicewicz provided HLAC's perspective on a wide range of topics about the "circular process" of ensuring hygienic healthcare textiles (HCTs) for every patient in the hospital. The article comes as HLAC gets set to participate in the Association for the Healthcare Environment (AHE) Exchange 2018 conference in Columbus, Ohio, on 23-26 September.

Gicewicz is president of Sterile Surgical Systems and past-president and inspection committee chair for HLAC.  

Gicewicz discusses how Infection Preventionists (IPs) can make a significant difference toward enhancing infection prevention efforts relevant to HCTs.

“We would encourage as a reinforcing step in this direction the establishment of open communication and collaboration between the healthcare IP and the laundry profession, specifically the laundry vendor,” he says. “A good practice is for the hospital IP team members to treat their healthcare laundry professionals as part of their extended team, where there's an ongoing sharing of updates in infection control and prevention efforts and in the regulatory and licensing arenas. Important to this team-style relationship is for the IP to visit the healthcare laundry to become acquainted with the personnel responsible for administering the laundry.”

Discussing why knowledge gaps around healthcare laundry-related infection prevention still persist, Joseph Ricci, president and CEO, TRSA responds that there will always be knowledge gaps about laundry because cleaning technologies will continue to improve. “Linen and uniform services will be first to implement improvements successfully and then other stakeholders will need to learn about them. Perhaps our most visible example of this involves California law, where healthcare laundry cycles are specified to be 24 minutes long at 160 degrees F. This rule was in force before development of wash chemistries of equal or greater effectiveness at lower temperatures. Recently, the state legislature has taken steps to change this rule so we are confident their knowledge gap will close. The need to close knowledge gaps is evident when laundry certification inspection protocols become unwieldy.

“Business technology improvements frequently provide alternative means to accomplish the same end; in this case, laundry hygiene. Lack of understanding of this flexibility can result in an excessively long list of inspection requirements that can’t be covered in an inspector’s daylong assessment of a laundry. Focusing on mandatory best practices that incorporate a variety of techniques that maximizes hygiene makes for a robust inspection and microbiological testing of clean textiles from the end of the laundry production line quantifies product cleanliness. This combination of process and outcome measures has long been practiced by the industry across the globe and is catching on here.”

The ICT article can be found here

https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/laundry/industry-roundtable-healthcare-laundry



Privacy Policy
We have updated our privacy policy. In the latest update it explains what cookies are and how we use them on our site. To learn more about cookies and their benefits, please view our privacy policy. Please be aware that parts of this site will not function correctly if you disable cookies. By continuing to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy unless you have disabled them.