J U L Y 2 0 1 7 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 7 1
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ast year, our hospital had 81 cases of hospital-acquired
Clostridium difficile. We're on pace to have about one-
third fewer hospital-acquired infections of all kinds this
year, a decrease I attribute to the whole-room disinfec-
tion technologies we've added to our manual cleaning.
Here's how we approach the manual terminal clean in our ORs. At
the end of a day or every 24 hours — whichever comes first — each
OR undergoes a top-to-bottom, floor-to-ceiling, edge-to-center termi-
nal clean. As opposed to the environmental cleaning we do between
cases, which is a 5- to 7-minute process designed to remove accumu-
The New Rules of
Terminal Cleaning
Has your approach to end-of-day
OR disinfection evolved with the times?
Randy Barnes, CHESP, CHEST
Bend, Ore.
• HIGH AND LOW A well-executed ter-
minal clean is a mostly low-tech enter-
prise, but high-tech tools have armed
facilities with new weapons to bust
those bugs.
