Tag: zip lock bags

How the Right Housekeeping Supplies Save Lives

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Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images – https://pixabay.com/en/users/Clker-Free-Vector-Images-3736/

Cleaning a medical center is not the same as cleaning a house. The risk of spreading contaminants is high, and it’s important to equip housekeeping staff with the tools they need to not only clean, but sanitize. While there are endless tips and tricks to reduce the spread of pathogens and improve cleanliness, two key ideas appear below. Even though housekeepers and janitorial staff are meant to stop the spread of infection, substandard and outdated housekeeping supplies can turn these lifesaving staff members and their tools into walking biohazards.

Disposable Protection

Issuing proper PPE is essential to protecting your employees. PPE simply stands for Personal Protetive Equipment. Nothing protects your employees better than disposable PPE products. While no medical professional would buy reusable gloves, many medical centers choose to reuse some housekeeping supplies rather than replacing them with disposables.

Not only do disposable products keep your housekeeping staff safe, but they also help maintain sanitation in patient rooms and public spaces. By changing PPE that comes into contact with potentially contaminated surfaces, your staff can restrict the contaminants’ movement. Changing gloves between every room, for example, prevents one patient’s cold from hitching a free ride on a housekeeper’s gloves. Since housekeeping duties require contact with touch points in a room, disposable products are critical to sanitation. Remember that reusable rags, mop heads, and other cloth products carry the same risks. Disposable wipes and scrubbing pads are always the most sanitary options. However, if you must use reusable items, be sure to have enough for each room to have its own. No rag should wipe down two rooms, and no mop head should scrub more than one floor between trips to the laundry room. Of course, even the journey to the laundry room increases the chances of accidental contamination along the way.

Sanitary Storage

While it is the job of housekeepers and janitors to keep medical centers clean, the closets and backrooms where their supplies are stored are often less sanitary than the areas they clean. And since housekeepers typically clean patient rooms and public spaces on a daily basis, they usually have the opportunity to clean their own storage closets no more than once a week. Because these storage units can hold everything from heavy blankets, to patient robes, to textile cleaning tools, it’s important to keep them clean. Without an increase in staff, however, this is implausible for many medical centers.

The alternative is to store housekeeping supplies smarter. Zip lock bags come in all shapes and sizes for a reason. They essentially hold anything you need to keep clean and dry. Since most janitorial closets have a tap for filling mop buckets and chemical sprays, it’s easy for traces of mold to grow and hide in stored textiles, paper products, and managerial supplies like notebooks and records. Mold is an irritant to most people, but it’s also deadly to many  patients. By storing vulnerable products in zip lock bags, housekeepers can preempt the threat. Zip lock bags are also easy to organize, not to mention well sealed. This means housekeepers need not suffer the pain of dropping the last clean towels on a dirty floor ever again.

These two simple changes can make a huge difference in sanitation and safety. Those in need of medical care need a safer, cleaner environment than most. It’s better to never know how many lives have been saved by preventative measures than to recognize even a handful of deaths that could have been prevented by better housekeeping supplies.

The Many Uses of Zip Lock Bags

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Image by WerbeFabrik – https://pixabay.com/en/users/WerbeFabrik-1161770/

Lately, hospitals have been in the news for using plastic bags to save the lives of premature babies. This is just one example of plastic, zip lock bags at work in the medical field. Plastic bags are aseptically clean, but not sterile, which makes them superior to cloth bags and cardboard boxes for storage. Of course, the sheer diversity of styles and sizes enables the humble zip lock bag to step into a host of roles.

SPECIMEN ZIP LOCK BAGS

Whether a nurse is taking blood, a patient is offering a stool sample, or a lab technician is preparing a DNA testing kit, it’s important that the specimen stays safe. In addition to the collection tube or jar that serves as the first line of defense for the specimen, it’s important to prevent the specimen from damaging or becoming damaged by other samples with which it is transported. Hospital quality, zip lock bags should be air- and waterproof. Such bags provide specimens with an excellent second layer of protection. They also help prevent dangerous spills and contamination when the specimens are handled by medical professionals during transit and unpacking. Although medical professionals should always use gloves when handling such samples, it is always better to have too much protection rather than too little.

STORAGE

Zip lock bags come in many shapes and sizes with a range of thicknesses available. Although your average sandwich bag may not stand up to the sharp edges of metal tools, there are plenty of bags available, specifically designed to resist puncture. These can handle anything from mechanical parts to examination tools. Do you need to keep spare batteries on hand for the remote in the waiting room? It’s easy to keep them from cluttering up a desk drawer by simply restricting them to a zip lock bag. Would you prefer a more sanitary way to store reusable examination gowns than simply letting them sit exposed in a dusty closet? Store them in individual bags or store entire stacks in the largest zip lock bags. Use the same technique for newborn attire and blankets. Nearly anything that does not come with its own case can be stored in a zip lock bag, and even if an item does have a separate case, a zip lock bag can go over the original casing as additional protection.

PATIENTS’ PERSONAL EFFECTS

Patients must often remove personal effects before a procedure. This can include removing items of clothing for an exam or removing any metal from their person before a scan. Keeping these items in an open dish is an invitation for disaster. All it takes is one elbow to send the dish flying, and suddenly you’ve lost the patient’s wedding ring. With zip lock bags the range of sizes once again comes in handy. Large bags are available for patients to store bulky clothes in, rather than simply leaving them where they could become soiled or inconvenience the examiner. Small bags help keep jewelry and watches safe, even within a larger bag so they do not become lost in the folds of larger items.

Zip lock bags may provide any number of innovative uses, like warming tiny newborns, but it’s important to have them on hand to manage more mundane tasks. Still, having a ready supply of zip lock bags ensures you and your team are ready for the unexpected. You never know when an opportunity for creative thinking will come knocking.