For environments such as care homes, hospitals, and clean rooms, maintaining excellent hygiene during laundry operations is critical to minimizing the spread of harmful bacteria and ensuring a safe laundry operation for patients and staff alike. Find out how integrating barrier washers into an on-premises laundry (OPL) can help ensure a near-failsafe approach to hygiene and safety.
Turning barriers into solutions
For hygiene-critical industries, the OPL forms the backbone of the entire laundry operation, ensuring steady turnover of essential materials such as gowns, personal protective equipment (PPE), and linens.
With this in mind, ensuring a hygienic environment is naturally the top priority for laundry managers working in these fields. However, despite the many measures taken by staff to ensure best practice for hygiene in OPLs, the reality is that using a standard commercial washing machine, where dirty and clean laundry are loaded and unloaded from the same point, will always present some risk of cross-contamination.
Here, it may be time for laundry managers to look beyond standard commercial washers, towards specialized solutions that are designed with the unique demands of hygiene-critical environments in mind.
During the cycle, the Hygiene Watchdog function will closely monitor if the selected program has reached the required level of thermal disinfection, only releasing the load once this criterion has been satisfied. The ClarusVibe display, which features on both the front and reverse of the machine, will clearly indicate the current status to operators throughout every phase of the program.
This also allows the OPL itself to be split into ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ rooms, with the appliance forming the partition. Here, the laundry manager has the option of assigning dedicated staff to each – one to sort and load fabrics, and another to unload, dry, iron, and re-sort, for further optimization of both workflow and hygiene strategy.
Hard on bacteria, easy on the body
The machine’s drum is split into two sections to help simplify loading, unloading and the separation of fabrics, and features automatic positioning at the start and end of each cycle. Similarly, the washer’s outer and inner doors lock and unlock automatically, with the latter pre-opening at the end of the wash cycle.
These features combine to maximize ergonomics and reduce the physical impact of operation on staff, helping to ensure their safety, with a four-star rating from internationally accredited body ErgoCert© testament to this commitment.
Making a clean break
OPLs with highly unique demands require solutions that are equally specialized to meet them effectively. For this reason, barrier washers should be the natural choice for environments such as hospitals, care homes, and clean rooms. While there is no foolproof method of ensuring total hygiene control and safety for OPLs, barrier washers provide the best possible guarantee to help put laundry managers’ minds at ease.