By Veselina Dzhingarova
Maintain a state of the art waiting area for your patients featuring chairs with non-porous surfaces and plenty of trash receptacles to keep your office cleaner. Instruct your workers to wipe down all areas with antibacterial wipes to help prevent germs from replicating and spreading to other areas. Unfortunately, some illnesses spread quickly, even in the cleanest of medical facilities. Working with an infection control consultant will aid you in identifying potential hazards within your workplace as well as managing outbreaks before they become detrimental to your business. Remember that hiring a team of healthcare professionals who know how to treat patients is one thing but keeping your medical practice free of pathogens requires a different type of expert.
Analyzing the Risk of an Outbreak
Your medical practice may have signs posted to help inform patients and staff of their duty to clean up after themselves, but it only takes one person being infected for an outbreak to emerge. Consider how quickly pathogens can spread after someone uses the facilities and fails to wash their hands. Those germs can be spread to the furniture and even your examination rooms over the course of just one or two hours. Infection control consultants can help you in identifying how bad a potential outbreak would be at your medical facility given your current practices. That information can also be used to prevent future contamination and the spread of dangerous pathogens.
Preventing Contamination
Installing equipment such as touch-less paper towel dispensers and toilets that automatically flush could be the key to stopping contaminants from being spread at your medical facilities. The suggestions that are given to you by an infection control consultant will be personalized and based on the size and specific structure of your practice. Medical facilities that are used to treat and care for pregnant women or the elderly, for example, may be urged to take additional precautions as the people they serve are more at risk.
Monitoring the Cleanliness of Your Facilities
After getting an assessment, you will need to have your facility checked to ensure that there is little risk of a serious outbreak. Cultures may be taken from various surfaces to check for pathogens and your staff may even be surveyed on the level of cleanliness at your business. Whether assessments are continuous or infrequent, it is vital that your medical facility is looked after by someone who specializes in infectious disease risk factors. One particularly bad flu season could lead to an outbreak in your practice, sickening your staff and causing you to temporarily shut down. Whenever you have questions about pathogens and infectious diseases you should go to a consulting firm that can give you specialized advice.
No amount of hand sanitizer is going to rid your medical facilities of all germs and pathogens, but you can still keep the risk of outbreak very low. Keep up to date on the spread of diseases in your region so that you can act fast before a crisis develops. Most importantly, maintain good cleaning habits that are streamlined to work with your particular medical specialty.