WATER HYGIENE & SAFETY
Trust targets 100 per cent flushing compliance
A software system that automatically emails hundreds of clinical and non-clinical staff across the Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust’s three hospitals requesting confirmation that low-use toilets, showers, and taps have been regularly flushed in line with HTM 04-01 guidance, is reducing the risk of biofilm build-up, and thus of Legionella and Pseudomonas aeruginosa colonisation, with, on average, a 95-97 per cent flushing compliance. As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered from the Trust’s Estates & Facilities Information & Compliance manager, Vince Tennison, the system is just one of an arsenal of measures that the Trust’s Compliance team is harnessing to keep patients safe, and provide assurance of compliance to the Board and regulators across a range of estates and facilities activities.
The Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust’s three hospitals – the Scunthorpe General Hospital, the Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital in Grimsby, and the Goole and District Hospital.
Healthcare estates and facilities managers in hospitals countrywide will know how time consuming and labour-intensive a task their engineers face in ensuring that low-use water outlets are regularly flushed in line with guidance in HTM 04-01: Safe water in healthcare premises, the Health & Safety Executive’s Approved Code of Practice L8, Legionnaires’ disease. The control of legionella bacteria in water systems, and HSG 274, Legionnaires’ disease: Technical guidance document, to reduce the risks of biofilm formation, and thus the chances of Legionella and P. aeruginosa proliferating in taps, showers, and other water outlets. Not only must low-use water outlets in wards, augmented care areas, and a variety of other clinical and office spaces, be regularly flushed to prevent water stagnating and creating conditions favourable to biofilm formation, but the process must be carefully and meticulously recorded and kept up to date, so that the data can be made
‘‘
available promptly for inspection by anyone from the Trust’s head of Infection Prevention and Control, to visiting Care Quality Commission personnel.
A laborious task
Before the advent of compliance management software systems such as Digital Missives’ L8guard, which has modules for verifying flushing compliance as part of a wider strategy to guard against both Legionella pneumophila and P. aeruginosa, many NHS Estates and Compliance teams had to spend hours each week verifying that low-flush outlets across a potentially sizeable estate had been flushed in line with the frequencies set out in healthcare guidance. This generally meant sifting through hundreds of paper returns each week, manually inputting the data, and then identifying repeated instances of non-compliance. Repeat ‘offenders’, such as a particular ward, department, or office, would then have to be chased via email or telephone
This meant sifting through hundreds of paper returns each week, manually inputting the data, and then identifying repeated instances of non-compliance
to discover the reason for their low- flushing compliance, and encouraged to improve it.
A fully automated solution Digital Missives recognised that Estates teams would benefit from a software system that fully automated the process of obtaining flushing returns from potentially hundreds of different contacts, and would even remind late or non- responders of the need to flush and send in a return, if necessary escalating the matter to more senior staff. On receiving the data, the L8guard software (which Digital Missives launched in October 2010 as a Legionella module, and was subsequently followed in April 2013 by a Pseudomonas module), obviates the need to sort through and manually input data from hundreds, or even thousands, of paper forms by extracting it from pro- forma emailed returns and collating the information into a managed database. Digital Missives manages all the data offsite, adding new contacts and deleting existing ones when staff move, leave, or assume a new role, while the system can generate a wealth of different reports viewable in digital or paper form. This allows, say, an Estates or Compliance
March 2020 Health Estate Journal 45
©Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64
