ADVERTORIAL
Keeping Your Reputation Whiter Than White
Laundry specialist Berendsen offers advice on what care homes can do to get on top of laundry to deliver the best possible service.
For care home residents and their friends and families, laundry is highly emotive and can cause the home’s reputation to be improved or dirtied, depending on the service provided.
The highly visible nature of laundry makes it one of the things that can either create calm or conflict in the care home and misplaced, damaged or inadequate levels items can become major issues for managers. Here are some straightforward procedures that can be put in place to avoid the care home’s ‘dirty laundry’ being made public!
KEEPING TRACK Although almost all items go missing in innocent
and inexplicable ways, such incidents can affect trust and may provoke some feelings of resentment between residents and staff. Part of the problem is that on-site laundry operations are routine, day-to- day and incredibly busy, meaning their importance can sometimes be taken for granted. It is oſten not until something is lost that the magnitude of the issue becomes apparent – by which point the damage is done and it is too late.
To overcome this issue, an increasing number of care homes are working with experienced laundry services providers to considerably minimise the problem of lost laundry. Berendsen, for example, has invested in sophisticated tracking technology to ensure every item is traceable throughout the laundering process for peace of mind.
Such technology can minimise the chances of items of clothing being mixed up between different residents. In the case of Berendsen, dedicated laundry bags that feature embedded RFID tags are supplied for every resident in a care home. These washable bags can be scanned and tracked along with the laundry items to further facilitate all garments being returned to their individual owners.
MINIMISING DAMAGE The use of RFID tags and QR coded labels doesn’t
only minimise the risk of lost laundry items however. They can also be used to instantly flag up any special care requirements for specific garments when each is scanned to remove the additional threat of
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damage to delicate or woollen clothing. This also ensures that clothes are laundered – and ironed if required - at optimum levels.
STOCK CONTROL As well as personal resident items being misplaced
or damaged, another potential area for complaints is when stock runs low on towels, cloths and bedding. This can be due to staff illness placing pressure on the internal laundry service, or resident illness creating more demand than usual. Instead of ensuring a large surplus of items is kept for such emergencies, the benefit of an outsourced laundry provision is that specialist care home packages can be hired that ensure that sufficient towels, cloths, and bedding are delivered when needed. This allows for the just-in-time delivery of extra stock in emergencies, as well as freeing up space in the care home as a larger amount of internal stock is not needed.
As well as delivering peace of mind, an outsourced laundry service also frees up care staff to focus more of their time on residents and eliminates the hassle associated with leasing machinery, conducting maintenance, organising insurance, and purchasing detergents. Independent research has highlighted just how big a problem laundry can be, with one in seven care homes feeling that their current in-house laundry system is simply ineffective. Reliability is also causing serious concern as more than half of homes suffer washing machine breakdowns every six months, making consistent laundry provision difficult.
With a positive reputation sometimes taking years to cement, it is critical that care homes do all they can to protect what could be considered as one of their greatest business assets. As the accidental loss or damage of a resident’s personal item during the in-house washing process can affect all those years of hard work, managers need to assess whether their onsite facilities are truly capable of efficiently handling the job or whether it would pay instead to outsource laundry altogether for multiple benefits that can also be realised by their staff and residents.
www.berendsen.co.uk/care www.tomorrowscare.co.uk
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