Infection control
The three ‘Rs’ of laundry in care homes
With the laundry room at the front line of a care home’s infection control and with strict infection protocols set to continue, Amanda Symmons from Washco, the commercial laundry specialists, explains three key areas for managing care home laundry to achieve safe results
Three key areas need to be correct to ensure that laundry is not a cause of infection in care and nursing homes: the right laundry equipment, the right processes, and all staff trained with the right understanding of their impact upon the laundry process.
The right equipment Make sure your machines meet WRAS regulations Under WRAS (Water Supply (Water Fittings) Regulations or Scottish Byelaws), all washing machines within a care setting must be Category 5 rated. This means risk from backflow must be minimized, i.e. reducing the risk that contaminated water from an appliance could enter the water supply, putting water and health at risk.
Check your machines are the right capacity Your machines must be the right capacity because, to put it simply, if you overfill your machine it cannot do its job properly. Laundry items need adequate room to agitate and free any debris for you to be
100 per cent confident that they are clean and infection-free. As a general idea, if you cannot fit your hand in the drum above the laundry being washed then you have probably overfilled it. If you are reviewing your laundry,
therefore, a key check is that you still have the appropriate capacity machine that suits the evolving requirements of your home. As a rough rule of thumb, each care home will need on average 0.5 kilogrammes capacity per resident. However, this will depend on your
home’s particular needs and will require adjusting accordingly. For example, a nursing or dementia home may require more laundry per resident compared to a care home – e.g. 0.75 kilogrammes capacity per resident. On the flip side, residential homes may
only need as little as 0.4 kilogrammes capacity per resident - based on a laundry operating for eight hours per day, seven days per week. When it comes to tumble dryers, typically, the drum of your dryer should be twice the size of your washing machine drum.
kilogrammes vs. litres When you are in the process of buying a washing machine, you may be presented with capacities in varying metrics – kilogrammes, pounds and litres. The kilogramme/pound measurement is the amount of dry laundry that can fit in the drum, while litres is the volume of the drum in total. Typically, the ratio for washing machines is nine to ten litres for every kilogramme of dry washing. As this can vary, we would recommend looking at both the litre and kilogramme measurements to ensure you are fully informed before making a purchase.
Have enough machines for the job It is usually better to have a mix of machines rather than one large machine. This makes it easier to process different types of linen according to their textile family, giving a better wash and drying result.
Service your machines regularly As with most equipment, servicing is key to ensuring everything is working properly and is safe, particularly for machines that are fuelled by gas. If you do have gas machines make sure that the service company you use is Gas Safe-registered and that their engineers are Gas Safe- trained.
Regular maintenance also means
you can be confident the machines are meeting the temperatures needed for thermal disinfection.
The right processes The process behind cleaning laundry correctly has not significantly changed since Herbert Sinner developed a method in the 1950s around achieving good cleaning results. Known as the Sinner’s
August 2021 •
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