By: Douglas Wright, President, Scigiene Corporation
It seems like every other week we are faced with yet another outbreak of C. difficile, M.R.S.A. or some other bacteria or virus. Improved cleaners and sanitizers will help and so will antimicrobial coatings, better furniture and equipment designs. Better training of cleaning and other hospital staff will also reduce the spread of infections.
Ultimately you will need to know if these practices are actually working or even being implemented properly! The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encourages all hospitals to develop preventative programs to optimize and monitor the thoroughness of high touch surface cleaning.
Clean looking surfaces can still harbor millions of bacteria and viruses, so visual inspections only go so far. Microbial testing is great for identifying the species present and measuring their spread once an outbreak has begun but the area tested has been in use for several days by the time you get results. This is a perfect case of too little information, too late. You need instant results to combat outbreaks. Clearly we need instant results to alert cleaning and infection control staff if the surfaces have been cleaned properly.
Rapid methods using fluorescing dyes need to be pre-applied, are prone to chemical interference and can be identified easily using small pocket sized UV lights. Even more problematic is that the passes and fails need to be manually recorded or simply do not get recorded at all. This makes data analysis difficult and as we all know when data collection is difficult it usually does not get done.
ATP systems have been around for many years and are used successfully in food processors. So what has limited their success in hospitals? Quite simply the test swabs supplied by all manufacturers are sensitive to chemical interference by the same cleaners/sanitizers that you commonly use. If you wait long enough after sanitizing the strength of the sanitizer will decrease and they will eventually work. But how long is long enough and few of you have the luxury of waiting several hours before testing. So for 20 years ATP studies in hospitals have given mixed results. All of this pending on the controls put in place during the testing. But under real world circumstances they usually failed miserably.
Quite often products or procedures that would pass using microbial testing or even visual audits would fail using ATP systems.
The reasons for these erratic results were and still are predominant for most systems available today.
These are the results of:
a) Other ATP detection systems did/do not have the required detection limits
b)Other ATP systems do not have higher chemical resistance. Supersnap’s higher resistance is important to resist the chemical residues that would give other methods false results.
A few years ago Hygiena introduced a NEW type of ATP swab called the Supersnap. Unlike all other systems this swab was designed for post sanitizer use. This means repeatable results with up to 1000 ppm hypochlorite residues So finally just like your colleagues in the food industry you can now get instant, repeatable accurate results to evaluate your cleaning/sanitation programs.
Using our NEW Ensure V2 hygiene meter the tests are easy and can be logged based on the surface/equipment tested relative to the room/wing of the hospital and even logged to the instrument user/cleaners. Quick analysis of this data allows infection control specialists and managers to identify among other things:
-what cleaner/sanitizer or program actually does work better?
-what areas of the hospital might need greater attention?
-which staff might need upgraded training?
-what equipment might need replacing?
-what design changes should be made during renovations?
BONUSES
-results can be posted to staff bulletin boards allowing for positive feedback.
-positive feedback encourages staff to do a better job and become proactive.
-some hospitals have been able to see increased sanitation levels of 2 to 10 fold as a result.
COST SAVINGS
We are often asked to show studies linking improved sanitation to savings due to decreased outbreaks. The real questions should be “what are the savings your management project with decreased outbreaks”. Those numbers are usually massive and dwarf the costs of even our most aggressive monitoring programs. Even a simple 2 fold increase in sanitation levels would decrease outbreaks and in turn generate the savings to pay for further improvements.
The ENSURE ATP Cleaning Verification System
Hygiena’s ENSURE ATP Cleaning Verification System is a tool used to monitor and improve the cleanliness levels of surfaces in healthcare facilities. Additionally the system acts as a tool to educate cleaning staff and other hospital personnel on proper cleaning techniques for terminal cleaning. With the ENSURE ATP Cleaning Verification System hospitals can standardize the assessment of surface cleaning throughout one or multiple facilities and monitor cleaning on a continuous basis.
The ENSURE ATP Cleaning Verification System enables healthcare organizations to:
