CLEANING, HYGIENE & LAUNDRY


Leaving the Laundry Room


Berendsen UK’s business development director for UK care homes, Jerry Richardson, describes the challenges facing care homes that handle laundry in-house and outlines one possible solution.


Every minute a member of care home staff spends on laundry-related tasks is a minute they’re not providing direct care to a resident. This is a common frustration among care home management teams, who want to minimise this lost time and maximise the time staff can spend face to face with residents.


However, in most care homes that handle laundry in-house there is little opportunity to reduce the time spent in the laundry room. With large volumes of linen, towels and resident clothing all needing to be washed, dried and in some cases ironed, not to mention folded and sorted, the laundry process is more time and energy intensive for staff than many realise.


Considering how often large volumes of laundry must go through the cleaning process, an interesting insight highlighted by a recent survey is the frequency of washing machine breakdowns. Over half of care homes surveyed suffer machine breakdowns as often as every six months, with the average home experiencing at least two per year – but several reporting as many as four a year. This places significant levels of stress on staff, who are already working in busy and demanding environments.


In many cases, those responsible for the laundry process in a care home aren’t aware of other options and their potential benefits. One alternative for care homes, which is commonplace in UK hospitals, is to outsource laundry services to an experienced textiles and laundry services provider.


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This is becoming a more enticing option for a number of important reasons. Advances in technology allow a laundry provider the flexibility to cater to the individual needs of a care home, freeing up staff time. Leading laundry providers ensure compliance with the latest best practice guidelines for infection controls. In addition, the removal of large washing machines and driers can offer space saving opportunities and the potential for that space to be repurposed for residents or for operational activities.


One in four care homes identified a need for more space for laundry but achieving this is challenging in a care home environment. Increasing the size of laundry facilities is likely to be a costly endeavour and there is no guarantee that the frequency of machine breakdown will reduce. A laundry service provider has effective processes in place, including multiple machines and sometimes multiple sites across the country to ensure continuity of service.


Thanks to the latest electronic track and trace technology, larger laundry providers are able to reliably wash, dry, iron, pack and return clothing to individual residents. If managed internally, care homes or families need to tag all residents’ clothing, which usually involves the time- consuming task of attaching a name label to each and every item. This process clearly has its flaws: when questioned about laundry problems, half of surveyed care homes said losing items caused significant trouble for their staff and residents.


Over half of care homes


surveyed suffer machine breakdowns as often as every six months.


The latest labelling and scanning systems used by providers such as Berendsen ensure that every garment is traceable right through the laundering process all the way back to its individual owner. The best providers will also come on site to the care home to assist staff with the labelling process, ensuring it is done sensitively to keep any inconvenience to both staff and residents at an absolute minimum.


Partnering with an experienced laundry services provider offers many benefits. Although effectively and reliably cleaning linen and clothing is essential, care home management teams can also ensure that members of staff are doing what they do best, which is providing direct care to residents instead of focusing on tasks in the laundry room.


www.berendsen.co.uk www.tomorrowscare.co.uk


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