A recent research study published in the American Journal of Infection Control is comparing the cleaning habits of hospital rooms with the common disinfectant wipes to the ones that contain a colour enhancing dye that will allow the person using the wipes to easily see which areas they have cleaned.
With the colour additive, rooms were 69% comfortable to be in and worked well in avoiding condensation formation. They can be cleaned in slightly less time as compared to the cleaning with normal wipes. This study was done at Griffin Hospital in Derby in Conn.
HAIs (healthcare associated infections) are considered serious threats to patients and objects surfaces in health care facilities contribute to many of those infections. As per 1 study established that patients admitted in hospital were approximately 5.8 times more likely to get an HAI if they slept on the bed of a previous patient with the same infection.
Several earlier research have established that multi-faceted efforts and concentration towards the cleanliness of hospital rooms are inadequate to meet the required standards that will effectively eliminate HAIs.
In this study clinicians examined the effectiveness of hospital room sanitation done in two methods. First, they evaluated the status for a one-week period: EVS teams applied routine disinfectant wipes for cleaning ten rooms which were randomly chosen.
They then proceeded to train the EVS teams how blue wipes – a wipe that turns to clear after several minutes of force and friction is applied when cleaning surfaces. This makes users be able to visualize easily what has been cleaned with proper technique from what has not been cleaned.
It was obvious that employing the colour additive, as assumed, yields desirable results. Overall, in the course of the two weeks of the survey, 92% of the surfaces were free of microbial colonies. Relative to this, a regular clean with the standard wipes left microbes on 60% of sample surfaces while when the colour additive was used, microbes were found on only 31% of the sample surfaces, representing a 48% improvement.
Further characterization of the microbes that were still present after the cleaning step demonstrated that the application of the colorant reduced room density by 69.2%, along with cleaning as compared to the market standard wipes. Furthermore, the additive decreased the time required to clean by a very slight margin; from 39.1 minutes to 36.8 minutes.
“This is the first study that compares colour additive-supported hospital cleaning against microbial burden and the first to assess the impact on cleaning times,” says Olayinka Oremade, MD, MPH, CIC, the lead author of the study, and infection control manager at Griffin Hospital.
Altogether, our findings evidence the enrichment profit derived from the use of a simple picture, which helps increase the level of room tidiness significantly and, apparently, boosts cleaning crews’ productivity within the room-cleaning cycle.
Reference:
The impact of a novel colour additive for disinfectant wipes on room cleanliness and turnover time, American Journal of Infection Control (2024).
