According to a novel research piece recently published in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC), the use of a simple colour additive in disinfectant wipes significantly enchanced room sanitation while diminishing time required for cleaning in hospitals. The study was conducted at Griffin Hospital in Derby, Connecticut and the results unveiled a significant improvement in cleaning efficacy – rooms cleaned with these colour additive wipes were found to be nearly 70% cleaner than their counterparts cleansed with standard disinfectant wipes.
Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) continue to pose a substantial threat to patient health, with contaminated surfaces within hospitals directly linked to a majority of these cases. Therefore, achieving utmost cleanliness in hospital rooms is imperative to curbing the spread of these infections. Although multiple studies have emphasised the need for thorough cleaning, many hospital rooms fall short of the required standards.
This novel research took the approach of comparing the efficiency of standard disinfectant wipes and wipes with a unique colour additive that provides visual cues to users about the cleanliness of the surface post sanitization. For this analysis, a testing cohort comprising of environmental services (EVS) teams used the standard disinfectant wipes to clean 10 random rooms for a week before being educated about the use of colour additive wipes. Following this, they repeated the same cleaning procedure on 10 different rooms, however with the colour additive wipes this time. Before and after each cleaning session, the rooms were sampled across 10 commonly touched surfaces to identify microbial presence.
The results markedly highlighted the benefits of the colour additive wipes. Prior to cleaning, 92% of the sampled surfaces displayed microbial colonies. Following disinfection with standard wipes, however, microbial presence still persisted on 60% of the surfaces. Meanwhile, the use of colour additive wipes brought down the microbial presence to just 31% of the sampled surfaces post sanitization – showcasing an improvement of approximately 48%. Furthermore, a comprehensive analysis revealed these rooms were 69.2% cleaner than those cleaned with standard wipes. An added benefit was a slight reduction in cleaning time, from 39.1 minutes using standard wipes, to 36.8 minutes using colour additive wipes.
Summarizing the study, Olayinka Oremade, MD, MPH, CIC, and lead author, emphasized the significant difference that simple visual cues made in attaining room cleanliness, also highlighting the slight time efficiency achieved with the addition of the colour additive.
This study of colour additive-supported hospital room cleaning indeed signifies the potential of innovative, yet straightforward solutions in enhancing specific cleaning tasks and ultimately bolstering patient safety and health.
Source: https://apic.org/news/with-the-use-of-visual-cues-hospital-rooms-get-nearly-70-cleaner/