How do you know you’re achieving best practice disinfection in your commercial laundry? With the very best commercial laundry solutions on offer, all brought to you by Richard Jay.
Understanding your laundry cycle
When it comes to disinfection, having an understanding of the laundry cycle is critical to maintaining the correct hygiene control levels in your facility.
- The laundry cycle starts at collection in the patient’s or resident’s room, with proper pre-sorting of dirty linen at the source.
- It’s important that the trolleys used to transport the linens to the laundry are regularly cleaned and disinfected.
- Sorting dirty linen and preparing batches to wash helps improve productivity and minimises rewash.
- The washing process includes four elements:
- Temperature: ensure the correct temperature is selected based on the items care label, soil level and disinfection requirement.
- Mechanical action: to increase movement and rubbing, reduce the load factor by 20-30% for improved results for medium to highly soiled items.
- Time: you need a minimum of ten minutes from when the machine reaches temperature to allow the chemistry to work and deliver appropriate cleaning.
- Chemicals: working closely with your chemical supplier to ensure formulas suit your wash requirements is critical in achieving the required results.
- Drying and Ironing needs to be carried out quickly to minimise re-contamination, and you should avoid leaving wet laundry in the washer or laundry trolley. It’s important to manage production effectively to maintain hygiene levels in the clean area.
- Proper protection of clean linen and preparation for delivery ensures cleaned laundry is kept in the ideal condition.
- It’s important to carefully transport cleaned laundry back to the stores to ensure it arrives without contamination.
- Linen should be properly stored and rotated on metal shelving to reduce spores and other contaminants.
Barrier laundries
In laundries, it’s important to have clear separation of dirty and clean areas – in fact, some facilities have separate rooms to keep these areas well defined.
The best separation solution is a barrier laundry, which makes use of a physical barrier to separate dirty and clean areas of the laundry. Barrier washers are designed with two doors – one for dirty and one for clean.
Having separate operators for the clean and dirty areas is ideal, however in smaller facilities, having a disinfection room between the dirty and clean areas allows the operator from the dirty side to clean their hands and change into the correct PPE when moving between the two.
Minimising the handling of clean laundry is also important, so it’s best practice to ensure ironers and dryers are within the shortest possible distance – something that helps keep the laundry path optimised whilst enhancing labour efficiency.
Thermal disinfection
Thermal disinfection refers to washing clothes at a hot enough temperature to achieve true disinfection. Australian Standards state that a load of laundry should be washed at a minimum of 65 degrees Celsius for no less than 10 minutes or a minimum of 71 degrees Celsius for no less than three minutes.
There are two ways this process can be validated. Either the machine’s controller can provide a downloadable report to detail that disinfection for each cycle was achieved, or the chemical system can provide validation. In the case of the latter, the team at our chemical division Jaychem can use RF temperature monitoring technology, which checks and reports on achieved temperatures through the wash process. This information can be viewed remotely through JayCloud.
Chemical disinfection
An alternative to thermal disinfection, chemical disinfection is an effective option where fabric is heat sensitive and too delicate to be washed at hot temperatures. Chemical disinfection occurs when chemical products are introduced into the wash cycle and balanced with a certain temperature and pH level. As with thermal disinfection, the chemical disinfectants need to be in contact with fabric for a certain period of time. Chemical disinfectant methods available from Richard Jay via JayChem include chlorine-based products, hydrogen peroxide and ozone systems. The Jaychem dosing system makes use of flow meters, which validate every cycle and measure that the correct dose for every chemical is achieved.
