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Hospitals that hire contract service firms to manage one or all aspects of their hospitality service departments increasingly expect those firms to help meet total quality management goals as well as offer the more traditional cost reduction, quality improvement and specialized expertise, finds the 1992 Hospital Contract Services Survey conducted by Hospitals.
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A laundry facility supplying linen to several hospitals needs to keep a good account of the numbers of different types of linen which enter and leave its premises so as to allocate the costs fairly and equitably among member hospitals. This task is made difficult by the problem of errors in counting due to high volume, different sizes and shapes of linen pieces, and human error in sorting. An electronic counting system has been installed in the premises to facilitate the process of counting, and this paper describes an approach for correcting the counting errors by applying factors that account for the inherent error in the system. These factors are estimated from sampling the contents of the sorted linen and statistical analysis of the resulting data. An efficient sampling scheme is proposed.
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The use of linen in health and social care should primarily be seen from a hygienic angle. Disproportions between the use of linen in the various fields of health care and the available laundry capacities have a negative hygienic and economic effect. Laundry capacities should, therefore, be calculated on the basis of specialty-specific guidevalues. The authors propose indicators suitable to this aim and present the results of a comprehensive analysis for the inpatient departments of internal medicine, surgery, urology, ophthalmology and otorhinolaryngology.
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As the bacteria found more frequently in hospital infections are the same found in the linen, it is speculated that hospital linens can contribute to the spread of nosocomial patologies. Nevertheless this consideration does not prove that linen constitutes a significant source for transmission of hospital infections, although some studies have strengthened this possibility. The hygienic problems of hospital linens washing have a great importance and in this contest the possibility of contagion throught infected sheets or overalls constitutes only a part of the question. The problem of the spreading of nosocomial infections has to be divided into (1) collection and arlage of the linens; and (2) their disinfection and washing. Collection and carriage need precautions to prevent the hospital staff and the patients from the direct contagion, while during the washing the infected, or potentially infected, linen are to be regarded as a potential risk, which can be avoided through a disinfection before the standard washing cycle. During the washing the processes of cleansing, the dilution and the effect of temperature could be sufficient to obtain the final results. The last consideration is linked to gestational aspects, that's to say the consumptions, the costs, the traditional organizing procedures and the alternative ones, such as the possibility of substituting disposable material to linens or to refer to central laundries placed outside the hospital building and independently operated.
Laundry workers have traditionally been offered little input into the ergonomic and health and safety aspects of their jobs. The "Let's Talk Back" program was developed in response to worker demands, in order to empower them to effectively address some of these concerns. The program, endorsed by the union and administered by a hospital ergonomist, provided formal educational sessions, physical demand analyses, and a forum in which to communicate concerns and suggestions for improvements. Language and/or literacy barriers required innovative educational approaches. Management's reluctance to allow the program to interfere with production schedules hindered the efficiency of the program, but probably contributed to the sense of empowerment in the workforce. Through active participation in ergonomic assessments as well as the educational program, workers were able to demonstrate to management that changes were needed.
Patients' dresses were washed at 40 degrees C using an ordinary detergent for 1 week and a novel detergent with added 'Triclosan' for the following 2 weeks. The bacterial load on the finished laundry was acceptably low using either detergent. The killing of residual bacteria on washed clothing by drying in a tunnel finisher was demonstrated. This preliminary study did not show any benefits to be gained from the addition of 'Triclosan' to detergent for the low-temperature laundering of patients' clothing.
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