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S U R F A C E D I S I N F E C T I O N combine them with the patient rooms after 312 swabs, 217 (69.6%) passed, repre- we notice that an employee's rooms con- our routine by-hand cleaning. They each data for a hospital-wide overview in our senting a decline in the number of cau- sistently get caution or failure numbers, take a different amount of time to operate monthly reports to the infection control tions and fails. Obviously, we'd like to we'll review their cleaning methods with — the UV takes less than an hour, while committee. reach 100% passing, but in the meantime them. the hydrogen peroxide takes several hours At the outset, our employees were afraid we've learned a lot about the strengths and We've even used this microbial detection — and as always, cost is a factor to con- that this testing was going to lead to imme- shortcomings in our surface disinfection technology to enact changes outside of our sider. But they all seem equally effective in diate discipline. We explained that we practices. For example: Although we are study. We've used it to train nurses how to carrying out the job, as evidenced by the weren't out to discipline, just to educate, really good at smooth surfaces such as clean their work spaces, the nurses' station swabbings our infection control team per- and they've been very receptive to the door handles — 1 wipe and you're done — counters, computer workstations, hand- formed in the room before and after they idea. When they see us coming with the bedrails are harder to handle. They're not held phones and other things they're were set to work. OSM machine, they want to join us in the room smooth, they're rough and porous, and we responsible for cleaning at the beginning of and watch the swabbing to see what their have to really work at them. every day, that may have been routinely Our housekeepers do a very good job, numbers are. Ms. Waugh (waug ha@wvuhealthcare.com) is the manager of environmental services and linen distribution for West Virginia University overlooked. We swabbed liberally and but we were surprised at how well they showed them how high the number was. Quality, improved cleaned the over-bed tables. We don't swab After they re-cleaned, we received a much The object of any quality improvement those on their top surfaces, but under- lower number. project is to collect baseline data, conduct neath, where contaminated fingers pull a program of training, gather continuing and push them around. (The detection sys- Whole room solutions? data to determine the effectiveness of the tem's product representatives recommend- The quality improvement study as we training, then administer retraining as nec- ed particularly effective places to swab.) planned and conducted it observed sur- essary to foster further improvements. We didn't expect they'd reach that site so face disinfection by manual means. We're Ideally, you'll discover some surprises and routinely. Healthcare in Morgantown, W.Va. all curious to see the effects that automat- develop additional applications along the If our tests turn up failure numbers, we ask the housekeeping employee who way. Each month, we've seen the success rate cleaned the room to return and fix the ed, mechanical disinfection might have on the results. We've been trialing systems that use rise. In our initial round of tests in problem. (If the housekeeper has already ultraviolet light or hydrogen peroxide to September 2012, we did 102 swabs and left for the day when we make the discov- disinfect a whole room at a time, for use in saw 61 of them (59.8%) pass. In March, ery, we ask another staffer to help out.) If periodic terminal cleaning in addition to 2 9 SUPPLEMENT TO O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E | M AY 2013 M AY 2013 | S U P P L E M E N T TO O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E 3 0