South London hospital’s ‘deep cleaning first’

Constructed to ISS Mediclean’s design by Barford of Norwich, and currently sited close to the service area at the sizeable south London acute hospital (which serves some 230,000 local residents), the new unit enables rapid yet thorough cleaning and decontamination of items such as patient beds, bedside cabinets and tables away from the ward. This significantly reduces disruption to patients and nursing staff, and ensures that “downtime”, in terms of the care actually delivered to patients in a comfortable ward environment, is minimised. Developed in tandem with the South London Healthcare NHS Trust, which operates the 480-bed acute site, the unit’s official “launch” last month followed the success of a mobile decontamination unit brought into service by ISS Mediclean around a year ago. Comprising a Mercedes flatbed truck specially adapted by Barford, the entirely self-contained mobile unit has been visiting hospitals the length and breadth of the UK over the past 12 months. While the vehicle has space and facilities on board to be able to deep clean and decontaminate the equipment and furniture, including bed, table and bedside locker etc, that generally form a single hospital bed space, at any one time, the new static unit at the Queen Elizabeth Woolwich can accommodate up to five beds and accompanying lockers and tables etc., for cleaning. Speaking at the static unit’s official public unveiling on 3 August, ISS Mediclean product development manager Collette Sweeney explained that, while the practice of “decanting” patients for deep cleans dated back many years, today few large NHS hospitals “had the luxury” of sufficient space to be able to decant regularly without imposing significant pressure on nursing staff and clinicians. She explained: “Bed space pressures in large acute hospitals are now such that any facility that enables beds and associated patient equipment to be thoroughly and rapidly cleaned, to a ‘clinically clean’ standard, away from the ward, and then returned to where it is needed fast, is an absolute godsend.” At the Queen Elizabeth Woolwich, beds, and other equipment for decontamination, are first covered with a red sheet to indicate they are about to be cleaned, and then taken to the static unit, where they travel up a ramp to the first “dirty” section. Here they are thoroughly cleaned by highly trained ISS Mediclean personnel using a combination of chlorine solution and microfibre cloths said to have a structure 100 times thinner than a human hair. The cloths impart a positive charge that traps dirt and dust.

Rigorous process

The furniture and other items are next steam cleaned within the unit using OspreyDeepclean equipment in a process that reportedly kills 100% of MRSA bacteria and up to 99.7% of C. difficile bacteria, before subsequently undergoing thorough “fogging” in the unit’s “clean section” using a portable ozone decontamination unit. They are then covered with a blue sheet to signify completion of the decontamin process, and returned to the ward. As part of the initiative ISS Mediclean has established additional storage space for beds and other items already cleaned and awaiting return. Collette Sweeney adds: “The OTEX Medical Sanitiser+ ozone fogging machines, developed by West Yorkshirebased JLA, deposit a thin layer of ozone onto all parts of the items being deep cleaned. This not only kills off remaining mould, spores and yeast, but also, with the additional help of an inbuilt UVC light, removes odours and destroys any remaining bacteria (including, JLA says, “superbugs”). The unit then effectively sucks the contaminated air back in and harmlessly disposes of it. “We did investigate using hydrogen peroxide vapour technology, but one of ozone fogging’s advantages is that it uses no chemicals, which means that, not only is there very little danger to cleaning personnel, but also that, when the foggers are used within in a ward environment particularly, the ward is ready for use immediately following cleaning.” (JLA says one OTEX Medical Sanitiser+ unit can effectively treat a 300m3 area in “as little as 60 minutes). Pam Keeling, mobile healthcare cleaning manager at ISS Mediclean, who has managed the team operating the mobile decontamination unit, and travelled with it all over England in the past 12 months, adds: “The Queen Elizabeth Woolwich had this first ISS Mediclean mobile unit on free trial for two weeks this January, and was highly impressed with it, which largely led to the development, and now the permanent location here, of the static decontamination unit.