Gordon McVean, International Sales and Marketing Director of Truvox International, explores how the correct choice of floorcare machinery can help enhance life for residents, visitors and care professionals.
In any care home setting, cleanliness levels are all-important. Viruses thrive in places where people come into close contact with each other – making care settings particularly susceptible to their spread, particularly during the winter months. The challenges in delivering consistently reliable hygienic cleaning are considerable. Budgets are limited, while increased life expectancy means there is a growing demand for aged care services.
While visible cleanliness may be reassuring to patients and public, an effective healthcare cleaning regime can’t be judged on appearances alone. The invisible microbes and toxins that can harm the health of patients and care home residents must also be eliminated. Attention to floors is critical as spillages and feet and trolley wheels can track soils around a building and transmit germs to clothes, hands and surfaces we touch.
Sustaining a high standard of cleaning performance requires operatives who are well-trained and equipped with the most efficient and effective cleaning technology. While there are various combinations of equipment types available, the experience of our clients in the healthcare sector shows that scrubber dryers often become the indispensable players in the cleaning team.
This is mainly down to the versatility and manoeuvrability of a multi-purpose floor cleaning machine such as our Multiwash range of scrubber dryers that washes, mops, scrubs and dries hard and soft floor coverings in a single pass. You can easily change and colour code the brushes for different cleaning areas – preventing cross contamination whilst providing outstanding cleaning results. The right machine can perform to the same high standard across a wide range of types of flooring – including safety flooring, now increasingly common in healthcare settings.
Yet hand mops are still used, and not only in toilets and wet rooms. While microfibre mop-heads are an advance on string mops, cleanliness is still compromised when soiled solutions in buckets are re-applied to a floor. Embedded dirt – which can provide a fertile breeding ground for micro-organisms in crevices and the grout lines of tiled floors – also defeats mopping. As hand-mopping is also time-consuming, even in cramped spaces and cubicles a compact scrubber dryer is a more cost-effective alternative.
Scrubber dryers apply only clean solution to the floor, and remove soils and used solution, leaving a surface that’s dry and safe to walk on in minutes. Their counter-rotating cylindrical brushes clean deep into grout lines where bacteria can easily multiply. The smallest model in our Multiwash rage features a 24cm cleaning path, making it ideal for confined spaces.
Noise and disruption need be minimised so cleaning can be carried out at any time of day or night. Cordless, battery-powered models carry out this work even more quietly and flexibly, with outputs up to 350m2/hour for the Multiwash 340 Pump/Battery, while avoiding trips risks.
The correct cleaning and maintenance of flooring not only prolongs its life – saving care settings time and money – but also ensures consistently high standards of efficiency and hygiene when cleaning floors.
www.truvox.com/sectors/healthcare
