Best procedures or products to ensure that the clothing is disinfected In a Hospital Setting By Rich Fitzmorris

Question:
I'm the Infection Control Nurse in a psychiatric hospital. We have a contract with an outside facility to clean our linen, but patient clothing is handled in-house. There are washers and dryers on each unit to launder patient clothing. I'm concerned that the water temperature may not always be hot enough. We use powdered detergent and also have the powdered non-chlorine bleach available to use. We have purchased clothing such as sweats and scrubs for patients who may need extra clothing while hospitalized. We want to be able to retain and reuse some of these clothes.  What would be the best procedure and /or product for us to use to ensure that the clothing is disinfected? Is dry non-chlorine bleach effective enough? I will appreciate any information or suggestions you may have regarding this issue.

Answer:
Reuse of patient clothing is standard in the hospital industry. With top load washers one has several options.

First, there are a number of retail products that have registration approval for sanitizing laundry. On the box you will find that the product has a kill rate of 99.9%, which is more than acceptable for the uses you mentioned.

Second, there are also final rinse sanitizers available from a retail store or a laundry chemical house. The product is added after proper washing and rinsing, and will again give the textiles a 99.9% kill of bacteria with a contact time generally around 5 minutes (again, check and follow the directions on the specific product label).
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Is Residual Bleach Smell Toxic?
By Rich Fitzmorris

Question:
Can the residual smell of bleach on sheets be harmful or toxic?

Answer:
Harmful and toxic can be two different things. To begin with I would recommend finding out why there is such a strong smell of chlorine bleach being left in the sheets. Most likely there is too much being used, and/or the sheets are being insufficiently rinsed.

Without knowing the specific amount of chlorine coming from the sheets, it is impossible for me to guarantee anything about safety. I do doubt that the smell of chlorine would be of any concentration that would cause harmful or toxic conditions. I would, however, have concerns that the sheets could cause considerable irritation to the skin of anyone lying on them. But any strong smell of chlorine coming off the sheet is more likely to damage the sheet than anything.

Hospital Laundry - Kitchen Towels Catching on Fire - What Would Cause This? By Rich Fitzmorris

Question:
I manage a hospital Laundry that has been challenged with cleaning the kitchen towels. Recently we had a fire in the kitchen and the rags that were processed that morning seemed to spontaneously combust into a fire. This is not the first incident of the rags/mops in the kitchen doing this. Any thoughts on what causes this?

Answer:
The answer is quite simple; the kitchen towels were not clean. Grease is being left in the towels and the heat in the dryer reaches a temperature high enough to start them on fire. There can be times when the kitchen towels come out of the dryers and are stacked up tightly as in a container, and again you can have combustion and fire.

The washing process is not nearly good enough to remove all of the fat and greases that have been absorbed into the towels. Generally these types of items need very hot water and a detergent system that can saponify the greasy soils so that they can be removed from the fabric.

Think of grease in a frying pan, when the temperature drops the grease turns solid and is difficult to remove, however heating the pan melts the grease and it can be wiped away quite easily. The same is true for the washing process; the only difference is the alkaline detergent acts the wiping process by breaking the grease up into little particles and allows it to drain off the fabric.

Note: Be sure to cool down the towels by spinning the dryer without heat to avoid spontaneous combustion which can occur if the goods are left in a basket for long periods of time.

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