How Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities Can Implement Steam Cleaning

When you visit a hospital or healthcare facility, it is likely to receive medical treatment for an injury, infection, disease or condition.  You go there looking for help with symptoms, to be treated and hopefully, to go home more healthy than when you arrived.  But, because hospitals and healthcare facilities see a wide range of patients for a variety of ailments, there is a high prevalence of germs.  You think of a hospital or healthcare facility as being a place of healing – a clean and safe place to get better.  But, without a strict attention to cleaning, a patient can unfortunately acquire an infection while in the hospital or healthcare facility that they did not have before they walked through the doors.  The CDC conducted a study and notes just how prevalent hospital contracted infections are, “The CDC healthcare-associated infection (HAI) prevalence survey provides an updated national estimate of the overall problem of HAIs in U.S. hospitals. Based on a large sample of U.S. acute care hospitals, the survey found that on any given day, about 1 in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection. There were an estimated 722,000 HAIs in U.S acute care hospitals in 2011. About 75,000 hospital patients with HAIs died during their hospitalizations. More than half of all HAIs occurred outside of the intensive care unit.”  For this reason, it is critical that hospitals and healthcare facilities have strict protocols in place when it comes to cleaning and disinfecting facilities.  One way to do this is through the incredibly effective method of steam cleaning.  While there are a variety of chemicals out there, steam cleaning does not uses chemicals but still remains a very useful tool in killing germs.

When you think of how to prevent the spread of infection within a healthcare facility or hospital, you may think of things like ensuring the doctors have disinfected their hands and equipment between patients.  Or, perhaps you may think of the importance of disinfecting the counter or patient bed and possibly rolling out that white paper for the new patient to sit on when they arrive.  But infectious germs can be in more places than that.  Any surface in which a patient comes in contact – including walls, floors, counters, tables, door handles and more can carry infection.  To best prevent the spread of infection, the use of a steam cleaner or steam vacuum is an ideal way to eliminate germs on all surfaces and stop the spread of infection.  The World Health Organization describes how germs are easily spread on healthcare facility and hospital surfaces, “The most frequent route of transmission, however, is indirect contact. The infected patient touches—and contaminates—an object, an instrument, or a surface. Subsequent contact between that item and another patient is likely to contaminate the second individual who may then develop an infection.”  A steam cleaner, such as a Vapamore steam cleaner, can be used to clean a variety of surfaces in a healthcare facility in an efficient, effective and cost-saving manner.  Steam cleaners can be used on floors, drapery, furniture, showers, bathroom fixtures, hand rails, air vents, bedding, wheel chairs, equipment, food trays and carts.  It is truly the all purpose cleaner.  By using steam clean you can prevent and get rid of things like bed bugs, dust mites, pests, allergens, and more – all without the use of harsh chemicals.  What better source than the CDC to listen to when deciding whether or not to use steam in healthcare facilities, “Of all the methods available for sterilization, moist heat in the form of saturated steam under pressure is the most widely used and the most dependable. Steam sterilization is nontoxic, inexpensive, rapidly microbicidal, sporicidal, and rapidly heats and penetrates fabrics… Steam sterilization should be used whenever possible on all critical and semicritical items that are heat and moisture resistant (e.g., steam sterilizable respiratory therapy and anesthesia equipment), even when not essential to prevent pathogen transmission. Steam sterilizers also are used in healthcare facilities to decontaminate microbiological waste and sharps containers but additional exposure time is required in the gravity displacement sterilizer for these items”