Laundry management
How to ensure your laundry meetsinspectionstandards
Clare Long, business account manager for care within the professional division at Miele, advises care home owners and managers on how to digest the available information to ensure their laundry practices are more likely to meet inspection standards
As many care home owners and managers will have discovered, the laundry, as a key support function within the home, can sometimes be a gap in their armour when it comes to achieving quality standards and positive inspection outcomes.
The compound issues of staff shortages, potential inspections, compliance and cost efficiency are just some of the challenges faced in the running of a busy care home; many of these issues relate to ensuring that the high standards of care and safeguarding demanded by the sector are achieved and maintained.
With the prospect of Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections constantly looming, care home managers need to ensure they have as much knowledge as possible about how their home is going to be assessed at their fingertips. In some areas this is easier said than done.
Take the laundry, for example. The running of an effective care laundry involves several criteria pertinent to a CQC inspection. One key example is the quality and effective operation of laundry equipment. Another is hygiene; considering that many care home laundries are highly likely to handle soiled clothing and bed linen, there is a need for stringent protocols and training to keep the spread of infection at bay. A big part of the challenge care homes face in assessing their laundry needs is that there doesn’t appear to be a definitive, published set of guidelines showing how a home’s laundry is assessed. This is an issue often raised by our care home customers when they are assessing their laundry equipment needs or redesigning their facilities. However, the CQC states: “The Department of Health has issued a code of practice about the prevention and control of healthcare associated
infections. The law says that CQC must take the code into account when making decisions about registration.” Published CQC inspection reports touching on laundry standards can be a useful information source as they provide real life indications of how to align your laundry facilities and processes with typical assessment criteria. Now publicly available, the reports provide useful insights into how laundry related issues have negatively impacted inspection outcomes and show the type of incident that must be avoided.
Points of failure
One inspection report found that a home in the Midlands had failed to protect people’s safety because the laundry room was disorganised, meaning the risk of cross contamination was high. This indicates that inspections are likely to review how well organised and documented laundry processes are and how rigorously they are followed by staff. Measures to overcome this could include ensuring processes are fit for purpose, well documented and communicated to staff. There should also be adequate training and retraining and an open feedback loop to demonstrate that concerns or queries regarding laundry processes are addressed and improvements are made, if required.
At another care home, inspectors were told by staff that wet and soiled laundry was washed together, as well as with residents’ clothes, which could lead to the spread of infection. Infection control in the laundry is clearly a major focus and the right processes and equipment must be used to address this. The separation of soiled and possibly infected laundry throughout the washing and drying cycle is vital. This should include the use of water soluble laundry bags, but for extra certainty could also
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www.thecarehomeenvironment.com • January 2019
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