Advanced Laundry Process for Industry-leading Infection Prevention
We know your patients' health are at the forefront of your health system or facility. As healthcare-acquired infections continue to be a challenge, along with their costs, it’s more important than ever to prevent avoidable complications and keep your patients safe. As part of our fully managed program, our commercial laundry services for medical facilities take the guesswork out of linen infection prevention and sanitation.
The Importance of Laundry Sanitation
“Hygienically clean” is a phrase that gets used a lot in the medical laundry industry. The problem is there is no universal definition for it. That’s just one reason we go beyond hygienically clean; to ensure that our linen and laundry is sanitized.
“Sanitized”, as defined by the EPA, means a 99.9% reduction in bacteria. But our laundering services don’t stop there: our wash process offers a 99.999% reduction of potentially dangerous pathogens*! This way, you know that your staff and patients’ health – and your reputation – are protected.
Sanitized Medical Laundry Service
Our worry-free linen programs are fully managed and comprised of quality products, cost containment through the management of linen inventory, and commercial laundry services.
Our laundering process includes infection prevention that exceeds standards: we meet or exceed OSHA, CDC and HLAC standards and comply with The Joint Commission requirements. This sanitized laundry process properly protects patients and staff, providing you with sanitized linen, even after the products have left our plant and arrive at your facility.
Because we've serviced the healthcare industry for so long, our product line and laundering processes are designed to meet your unique needs and specifications. This focus gives us a unique understanding of your primary goals: care that improves outcome, enhanced clinician and patient experience, and cost containment.
Our Laundry Sanitation Process
ImageFIRST’s medical linen sanitation process comprises of several key elements.
Protecting Staff
First, containing soiled linen is imperative, for the safety of your staff and ultimately your patients. This means using dedicated lidded hampers or drop lockers to physically separate them.
Once your Customer Advocate picks up your linen, they prioritize keeping that linen segregated and packed. Finally, once the soiled linen arrives at our facilities for laundering, we have clearly marked and physically separated areas in our plants. This ensures soils can never get anywhere close to clean linen.
Effective Cleaning: Sanitizing Laundry
The wash process is the first step to cleaning the laundry – both the visible and invisible dirt. That’s where we go beyond hygienically clean, ensuring our laundry is sanitized. After that, we apply a protective softener that inhibits bacteria from spreading. This means all your linen and staff apparel have an invisible “bio-shield”, isolating any pathogen that may land on your linen and preventing it from spreading*.
Preventing Recontamination
Cleaned and folded linen is then packaged in plastic to protect them from dirt from the time they are stored, then travel from our plant back to your facility.
Perception is Reality
From your patients’ perspective, the appearance in cleanliness will have a bigger impact than our infection prevention processes. If your bed and bath linen appear dingy or vary in shades of whites, or the patient gown has rips, missing ties or permanent stains, then they won’t appear clean. And ultimately, perception is reality. Likewise, your staff’s appearance – whether it’s a fresh lab coat or professional-looking scrubs – also plays in that perception and experience.
Our quality assurance process addresses this. For your linen to come back to you in a pristine condition, we conduct hand-inspection checking for defects. We discard items with large burns, permanent stains, holes, ripped ties or missing snaps. We adhere to our ‘family standards’: if it's not good enough for one of our family members, then it's not good enough for your patients, either.
Additionally, we ensure all bed and bath linen meet a ‘bright white’ standard, so that patients don’t get varying shades of dingy white or light gray sheets.
Inspecting What We Expect
It’s one thing to put standards and processes in place, and quite another to continuously make certain we are meeting them.
We document our medical laundry sanitation processes daily and run weekly checks. We then hire independent companies to conduct lab testing on a monthly basis to ensure our cleaning processes comply with and exceed these government standards. We then certify our plants every year.
This mix of checks and balances give you peace of mind that you’re getting what we say you will get.
Medical Sanitation, Part of Your Linen Program
With our healthcare expertise, we understand that you should be constantly focused on excellent patient care. Don’t let your linen get in the way of providing the best experience and care for your patients.
With ImageFIRST, you don't get a vendor, you get an extension to your team. Outsourcing your commercial linen rental and laundry service will not only free up your staff, but it will also ensure your infection prevention processes are compliant.
Partnering with us for your laundry and linen rental services means you’ll get a comprehensive program complete with medical laundry sanitation. All you have to do is choose the products that best fit your facility, and we will take care of the rest.
Learn how ImageFIRST can support your hospital or medical facility’s commercial or industrial laundry sanitation needs.
* For supporting data, please contact Ecolab