The Importance of Ensuring the Right UVC Dose
Pathogen transmission — resulting in healthcare-associated infections — costs hospitals billions of dollars annually. In order to successfully tackle IP and bring HAI rates down, it is vital for healthcare facilities to ensure their disinfection procedures are actually working. The key to efficacy in this area is monitoring IP strategy and strict adherence to disinfection protocols.
In today’s healthcare environment – including hyper awareness of virus transmission risk – hospitals need to choose technologies that can be measured and are able to provide the data needed to show proof of full IP dosing and compliance.
Choosing the Right UVC System
UV disinfection is the adjunct solution hospitals need to maximize their clinical outcomes and reduce patient-care costs. Exposure to UVC light for a specific length of time and intensity can help to reduce viruses, bacteria, and spores that manual cleaning methods can miss. It’s critical that the chosen UVC solution accurately delivers the proper dose of pathogen-killing UV light on targeted areas of your ER and patient rooms. The best UV disinfection system should measure, record, and report the UVC dosage delivered—in real-time—ensuring there is the proof of compliance data needed for potential government reporting and communication to patients. Critical information like date, time, operator, room number, cycle time, and delivered UVC dose should be captured to ensure proof of compliance throughout the environment being disinfected. The only way to confidently prevent the transmission of harmful pathogens in a hospital, while also minimizing room turnover time is to utilize a system that employs patented, remote UVC dose measurement sensors.
Critical Features
In a day of evidence-based medicine, value-based purchasing, and the drive towards delivering high-reliability health care, technology choices should be carefully researched. Critical features should include dose, the need for dose-based performance to achieve virus, bacteria, and spore reduction; time, the need for efficient and rapid room turnover, to ensure throughput is not adversely affected; measurement, the ability to measure that the dose set on the device is actually delivered to the targeted areas.
Contact us to get more information on how to ensure your disinfection methods are working to reduce pathogen spread with the correct UVC dosing.