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UVC Disinfection Promotes Patient Safety.

National Patient Safety Awareness Week engages the nation in a much-needed discussion about safety efforts throughout the healthcare industry. Did you know:

  • One in 10 patients are harmed when receiving care.
  • While in the hospital, one in 31 patients develop a healthcare associated infection (HAI).
  • 7 million HAIs occur in U.S. hospitals each year.
  • 99,000 deaths are a result of HAIs each year.

Although patient safety is a hot topic this March, it should be prioritized all year long. Patient harm can be caused by a variety of reasons, but 50% are considered preventable. Infectious pathogens, including Clostridium difficile (C. diff), vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and norovirus, can contaminate high touch surfaces, survive disinfection attempts, transfer to the hands of healthcare workers and infect patients upon contact. And while hand hygiene and cleaning protocols exist, they are not performed consistently.

A complement to existing protocols is necessary and evident in UVC disinfection. Using the germicidal wavelength, UVC disinfection devices like UV-CLEAN can decontaminate high touch surfaces from keyboards and carts, to IV pumps and monitors. Here’s the top three reasons how UVC disinfection can keep patients safe:

  1. HAIs have costly consequences for health care facilities when patients become infected. To combat the transmission of infection, daily disinfection is standard procedure. Creating an active disinfection environment, UV-CLEAN using UVC light disinfection has also been proven successful at destroying microorganisms including bacteria, virus, protist and fungus/mold.
  2. While increased access to information at the bedside has proved to deliver better patient outcomes, it has also introduced greater risk for patients to acquire a HAI. Motion-activated disinfection units like UV-CLEAN safely deploy UVC light to clean high touch surfaces with no disruption to patient care or staff workflow ­— now that’s disinfection made easy.
  3. In addition to keyboards in patient rooms, portable medical equipment (PME) and workstations on wheels (WOWs) can be used hundreds of times a day, acting as a mobile reservoir for multidrug-resistant microorganisms. UVC decontamination technology like UV-CLEAN can reduce the bio burden on in-room and mobile workstations and equipment to stop infection outbreaks.

While this information proves UVC disinfection is the ideal complement to hand hygiene and cleaning protocols, learn more by reading the clinical white paper that details how UV-CLEAN successfully reduced the bio burden in a healthcare setting.

Sources

Center for Disease Control and Prevention / Estimating health care-associated infections and deaths in U.S. hospitals / US Department of Health & Human Services / World Health Organization