How to Ensure Safe Healthcare Linens In Your Medical Facility 

Safe healthcare linens are difficult to manage and maintain in compliance with medical safety standards. The stakes are high, and any deviation from perfection could result in severe consequences affecting patient treatment or the quality of their stay.

The Challenges In Maintaining Safe Healthcare Linens 

There are three areas of healthcare linen management where their safety is most vulnerable. Identifying these is essential to finding the best solution for them:

• Cleanliness. Healthcare linens are dirty. In fact, without proper care, they can remain far from ideal cleanliness even after washing. Meeting hygiene standards for healthcare linens is difficult, even in ideal conditions.

• Handling and Storage. The need for strict infection control protocols concerning linens goes beyond the laundry hamper. How you strip your used linens off the bed is just as crucial as how they travel from the dryer to your storage space.

• Linen Shortage. Few healthcare facilities realize this, but linen shortage poses a threat to your facility. Linens don’t get changed as frequently, and contamination likelihood increases. Overall patient care quality goes down. And in extreme cases, healthcare linen shortages cause chaotic interruptions to your operations.

Unless top-of-the-line equipment is used, and laundering practices consistently monitored and measured for effectiveness, every new load is high-risk. On-premise laundries (OPL), especially in the medical field, are not an ideal solution to medical linen needs. 

Considerable Downsides of a Healthcare OPL

The biggest draw for OPLs is the perception of total control, particularly on safety. You get to wash and manage your linens exactly how you want to. The quality control, the methods, the handling – they’re all yours to control. Without a third-party company in the mix, it does appear as a more convenient and less expensive option, but that’s only the surface. The reality of OPL for medical facilities is one of unpredictable costs, capacity limitations, and demanding requirements. 

Here are some of the biggest and hidden downsides of medical OPL operations:

• Overhead Costs. Full laundry operation control also means full cost responsibility. Overhead in any OPL operation is not only enormous, but are subject to countless fluctuations.

• Capacity Limit. Keeping linen care in-house means that your inventory is all you will ever have access to. Hectic days are guaranteed to become a supply nightmare. Additionally, making adjustments for your growing needs will always require sky-high upfront costs.

• Labor Availability and Management Requirements. An OPL is its own facility. That means it requires its own investment, own space, own employees, and its own management. That can cost your facility far more than what you can ever hope to save.

How do you ensure the safety of your healthcare linens without jeopardizing cost and efficiency? The answer: a reliable healthcare linen service provider!

The Best Way to Ensure Healthcare Linen Safety

A reliable healthcare linen service provider gives you the best results for safety and price control. More than that, it gives you peace of mind. You get:

• Consistent Quality Control Standards. A professional medical linen provider secures multiple, tried-and-tested safeguarding standards that form the basis for even more secure quality control methods.

• Focused Service and Expertise. Linen service professionals are not only experts at what they do. They’ve built their operation to fulfill every regulation and safety protocol. This level of specialization gives you the best assurance that they are great at what they do.

• Secure Handling. Like quality control procedures, professional service providers also ensure the safe handling, transportation, and storage of your linens.

And best of all, healthcare linen service providers give you all of that without the cost or burden that on-premise laundry operations come with.

Northwest Health Care Has You Covered

Call Northwest Health Care today at 1 (360) 647-2974 to get started or to learn more about how we can help boost your linen management and maintenance needs. Also feel free to submit the form below.