DIRTY PATIENT MEDICAL EQUIPMENT IS NOT UNCOMMON

People who go to hospitals anticipate being treated and examined with clean and sanitary Patient Medical Equipment (PME). But can you trust that environmental surfaces and PME are always free from harmful bacteria? Dirty PME is more common than you’d think, and it can be very dangerous. Here’s what you need to know about dirty equipment and how it might affect the safety of patients during their care and treatment in your facility.

All hospitals and medical providers follow very strict procedures to protect their patients from infections. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that all equipment is 100% sanitary all the time.

In fact, dirty equipment is more common than you’d probably like to know. For example, the patient’s over-bed table. That little rolling cart you set your lunch tray and water cup on when you’re in a hospital bed is what?researchers call?a “high touch” object. That means bacteria is getting deposited on—and picked up from—those surfaces multiple times a day. This piece of patient room furniture presents a high risk for disease transmission because it has so many hiding places where typical disinfecting products and procedures don’t reach.

If a patient is admitted to a bed where the previous patient had an MDRO (Multi-Drug Resistant Organism) such as C. difficle the risk of developing C. diff infection doubles. And it’s not just C. diff – this same association has been demonstrated for MRSA, VRE, Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Underpinning this association is the uncomfortable fact that cleaning and disinfection applied at the time of patient discharge is simply not good enough to protect the incoming patient.

These samples of contaminated pieces of PME need to be effectively decontaminated to prevent the spread of “superbugs” in hospitals.

The Two Basic Principles of Cleaning

There are two basic principles in all cleaning: pH and physical removal. Physical removal is one of the best microbial decontamination processes. It lessens the number of pathogens from all surfaces as well as removes the food sources that aid?in their growth. If contaminants are removed from the surface, it is no longer possible for them to spread infections.?

Physically removing contaminants from surfaces should be the goal of any cleaning procedure. To physically remove contaminants from a surface, it is often necessary to alter their chemical state. This is the pH principle of cleaning. The pH principle of cleaning starts with water. Pure water has a pH of 7.

For bacteria to be killed or for many common soils to be removed, their pH needs to be altered. Adding the correct chemical compounds to water may change the pH, aiding in the physical removal process. Depending on the surface, the type of soils present and the required results, using a solution with the correct pH and chemical makeup for the task at hand can make the cleaning process more effective.?

PROCESS/PROCESSING

The term process includes cleaning and disinfecting a piece of PME in an AquaPhase Washer. We don’t clean wheelchairs; we process wheelchairs. We don’t clean stretchers or gurneys; we process stretchers.

How effectively can one “clean” the nooks and crannies of a wheelchair? How much time would it take to hygienically clean that same wheelchair?

Stretchers that have been cleaned manually would take 15 minutes. Afterwards, scientific auditing would show a high incidence of MRSA or C. diff bacteria remaining.

When speaking about new technology, one hospital leader stated, “We put a wheelchair, a patient lift, a cart or stretcher in the AquaPhase Washer and 3 minutes later it is decontaminated and back in service.”

FITNESS FOR PURPOSE

If hygiene procedures are to be effective, a determination needs to be done regarding not only product efficacy, but more importantly, whether the process results in what we want to achieve—namely equipment surfaces are hygienically clean (fit for purpose), as sufficient to break the chain of infection transmission.

WHAT IS IP66 AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT WHEN PROCESSING PATIENT CARE EQUIPMENT?

There has been some concern whether some of the patient care equipment in hospitals should be put through an AquaPhase Washer because of fears that water would get into the electronic components. The short answer to that question is, YES, if the equipment is IP66 rated.

Medical equipment with electric or electronic components that is put through a washer is recommended to have the equipment rated to IP66, i.e., so that dust and strong jets of water will not get into the components.

The manufacturer of powered patient care equipment wants to ensure the owner’s piece of mind by testing equipment to an IP66 standard. If water and dust can get into the motors, electronics, etc., then so can contaminated body fluids, bacteria, etc., and then there is a nice, warm breeding ground for the bacteria, and often “cooling fans” blowing contaminated air back into circulation. The IP66-rated equipment would be safe from the low-pressure spray nozzles in the AquaPhase Washer that are physically removing the soil from the equipment.

Let?Aqua Phase?assist you in developing a program that addresses the gaps in your PME cleaning and disinfection protocols beginning with identifying “who cleans what, and how often should it be cleaned?”

The Aqua Phase?AQ-4000?has the ability to thoroughly clean the vast majority of patientcare equipment while removing?biofilm?and killing the pathogenic survivors.