Trust targets 100 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. 

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