Exercising good hygiene
Dan Harding, Managing Director at Sychem, discusses dealing with the transmission of COVID-19 in gyms and leisure facilities.
will help to reduce the risk of body secretions remaining on the surface.
Given time, it is considered that natural order will return to these spaces and people will become accustomed to the procedures in place. The challenge for leisure facilities will be to ensure they continue to enforce and educate people of all ages on new hygiene processes.
With gyms and leisure centres opening their doors and a flurry of customers looking to catch up on lost exercise time, it will be crucial for business owners to focus on reducing the spread of COVID-19.
The reopening of these facilities will allow the transmission pathways of the virus to cause further disruption and risk to people across the country. This will be a complex and challenging problem that needs to be front of mind for businesses and employees.
Current guidelines and transmission data from the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest that the virus spreads between people through direct contact, indirect contact through contaminated surfaces or close contact through mouth and nose secretions, such as coughs or sneezing. People who are within one metre of an infected person are at risk from catching Coronavirus from infection droplets getting into the mouth, nose or eyes.
This is a worrying concern for many leisure facilities worldwide. To avoid contact with these droplets, it’s important to maintain social distancing, thoroughly and frequently clean hands, and cover the mouth when sneezing or coughing.
Ensuring a safe entrance into a leisure centre is key and fairly straightforward. The facility must deploy a suitable queuing system or scheduled arrival time for each visitor and provide hand sanitiser via a sanitising kiosk or through dispensers. Enforcing social distancing and avoiding contact with surfaces will become standard practice, as will regularly cleaning surfaces with a suitable cleaner and disinfectant. Facial recognition systems combining temperature mapping and mask identification can also be implemented to ensure the safety of staff and customers.
The real challenge comes within the gym environment itself. The nature of gyms means that equipment is reused. This will create many different transmission pathways between each machine or device. Users will need to thoroughly wipe down any equipment they have used to ensure that each surface touched is not only cleaned but disinfected too. This
74 | LEISURE AND HOSPITALITY
To make sure all types of equipment can be used, leisure businesses and cleaning staff must maximise their hygiene standards by taking a closer look at cleaning processes and products used. Now more than ever, facilities must take a robust approach to reduce the risk transmission pathways have on staff and visitors. They must provide products and introduce protocols that offer exceptional cleaning and disinfection capabilities that are not only safe to use within the environment, but do not present any risk to health or damage the equipment they are being used on.
Many leisure centres will not know what cleaning products they are currently using and as such it's important to check that those existing products are effective against COVID-19. Products must be suitable for repeat use on all surfaces and environments. Customers and staff will be asked to apply cleaners and disinfectants between the use of each piece of equipment. So, the products must not be hazardous and present as little risk to the user as possible.
Therefore, employees must understand the difference between single-stage and two-stage cleaning processes. Also, it’s key to note the requirements for disinfectants that do not feature an inbuilt cleaning agent and are only to be used after soiling levels have been removed with a pre- clean step.
To ensure ease of use and minimal risk to visitors it’s recommendable that products have a prolonged microbial persistence on surfaces. This is a great way for improving safety as a protective bug-killing layer can be left on the surface for as long as four weeks from the first application.
Sychem’s Control products are a way to reduce risk, as they are both cleaner and disinfectant in one. Available as aerosol, surface wipes or ready-to-use trigger sprays, they can provide up to four weeks of active protection, have no hazard warning meaning there is no danger to the user, are suitable for use on all surface types, have an adjuvant technology platform and do not alter the fire retardancy level of a surface.
In addition to daily use cleaning and disinfection products, new innovative cleaning and disinfection technology is emerging to further enhance manual methods of hygiene control, via the use of UVC light. Autonomous robots are being deployed in healthcare, schools, airports and hotels to maximise hygiene levels and complement manual methods of disinfection.
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