Company Blog
MEDtegrity Delivers Quality Laundry Service
With the worries of infection and other dangerous contaminates, it is more important than ever for laundry services to ensure that they deliver quality linen products to their customers. Keeping their employees, their customers and the patients healthy and safe is an important responsibility for all the MEDtegrity partners.
MEDtegrity assures that their partners follow effective routine laundry procedures within their plants. Following guidelines through the HealthCare Linen Accreditation Council (HLAC) provides piece of mind for MEDtegrity laundry service customers. This type of dedication shows their clients that MEDtegrity cares about delivering linens that are clean and contaminate free.
From the handling and transporting of clean and soiled textiles, to in-plant processing, the MEDtegrity partners follow disciplined procedures. Protecting clean textiles from soiled textiles is vital for all laundry service vendors. For MEDtegrity laundry service partners, policies and procedures ensure that a ‘functional separation’ exists between the clean and soiled areas within the plants, as well as during transportation.
Using proper cleaning methods provide hygienically clean textiles for healthcare use. The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation shares their definition of hygienically clean as “free of pathogens in sufficient numbers to cause human illness.” Clean textiles assure that they have been treated to the extent where biological contaminants have been removed.
When laundering textiles, HLAC guidelines require the following treatment processes to reduce or eliminate contaminates:
- Dilution Making several water changes during the cleaning process helps to flush away and remove bio-organisms.
- Heat Using elevated temperatures (>160 degrees F) during washing deactivates most of the common bio-organisms.
- pH Using high pH (>10.5) attacks bio-organisms and deactivates them.
- Oxidation Oxygen bleach acts in combination with other cleaning factors to deactivate residual microbes.
- Chemical Sanitizers or Bacteriostats Sometimes an added precaution an EPA registered product will be used as sanitizers during the final step of the process.
- Drying & IroningDrying or ironing at temperatures that exceed 180 degrees F deactivates any remaining organisms.
MEDtegrity meets all standards set forth by the HLAC and OSHA practices. All of the MEDtegrity partners train and educate their employees to show the same care and quality consistently. Each of the MEDtegrity Partners are privately owned and operated throughout the United States.
According to HLAC there are over 10-billion pounds of healthcare-setting textiles processed a year. The chance of blood borne pathogen exposure and infection are greater than ever before, so guarding against these threats is real. If you want to learn more about the MEDtegrity Partners, please give us a call at (888) 893-3334.
Information shared from the HLAC Website: http://www.hlacnet.org/.
