Infection Prevention is Everyone’s Job: The Important Role of Facilities Maintenance Teams

January 31, 2022 RLDatix Marketing

With COVID finally on the wane, healthcare facilities will gradually be shifting back to pre-pandemic procedures for patient care and personal protection. But while caregiver masking may once again be limited to acute care environments, other infection prevention practices that facilities adopted in 2020 should and will be with us for the foreseeable future. That’s especially true for best practices in maintaining facilities and facility equipment. 

The New Normal in Facilities Management

The critical role of facilities maintenance teams was front and center last year as it became apparent that the virus was primarily spread airborne. HVAC systems, including negative-pressure systems for Class N rooms, were critical for keeping patients and staff as safe as possible. The engineers and staff maintaining and cleaning that and other equipment over the past year deserve our thanks and admiration.

Moving forward, no one should ever take them for granted again. We’re pleased to see that Infection Prevention is a featured topic at ASHE’s Annual Conference this summer. Times are truly changing!

Industry Leading Solutions and Partnerships

Facilities Maintenance team members are not only skilled, they’re also resourceful. They’re often forced to track down copies of service and repair manuals and cleaning instructions on the Internet, for example. But that’s a lot of googling, just to ultimately learn there’s no archived documentation for your twelve-year-old industrial dish washer.

That’s why two years ago, we at oneSOURCE added a Facilities Maintenance Database platform to our family of manufacturer document databases, right alongside our Biomedical Service Manuals & Documentation Database and our Surgical Equipment & Instruments Database.

The Facilities Maintenance database contains service and repair manuals and related documents going back for many years – exactly the information that Facility Management teams and others at the facility need in order to efficiently and correctly maintain and sanitize equipment – to keep things running like a well-oiled, clean machine!

And to make this even more efficient, we’re forming strategic partnerships with premier CMMS providers, like MediMizer, a leader in comprehensive hospital management software. With these kinds of arrangements, healthcare facilities have all the information they need regarding their hospital equipment in one place.

Or as Gus Sakis, MediMizer’s President, & Global Sales Director for MidiMizer put it:

  • The MediMizer/oneSOURCE interface creates a single environment for all documentation needs. When healthcare facilities access the asset in the MediMizer software, they can quickly retrieve the documentation through the oneSOURCE embedded link, replacing the need for costly staff hours to manually file and update the documentation.

Don’t Forget About Compliance and Accreditations

The other new-old normal that healthcare facilities will be living with soon is the resumption of routine governmental regulatory oversight along with inspections related to the best-practice guidelines of the primary healthcare accreditation programs.

Just like with oneSOURCE and MediMizer, these organizations’ interest in facilities maintenance is nothing new. No doubt facility management teams are already familiar with standards from CMS, CDC, The Joint Commission, CIHQ and others that specifically call on healthcare facilities to maintain and service their nonmedical equipment in conformance with manufacturers’ guidelines.

As Heather Thomas, oneSOURCE CMO and VP of Sales and Marketing, noted recently:

  • MediMizer’s CMMS services are now linked to oneSOURCE, allowing technicians to quickly and efficiently perform corrective and preventive maintenance per compliance agency requirements.

We have no doubt that facility maintenance experts will continue to embrace their newly appreciated role in infection prevention and compliance as they take great care of their facilities’ environment and the air, water and surfaces in their facilities.

It’s a campaign by air, land and sea you might say!
 

Travis Horstman

Before joining oneSOURCE, an RLDatix company, Travis Horstman served as biomedical equipment engineer in the U.S. Air Force. At oneSOURCE he provides operational support and specialized assistance to the Biomedical database team. He is a former AAMI CBET Certification and a current CompTIA + Security Certification.

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