Hospital Design Blog – Jain Malkin Inc.

Manufacturers of healthcare furniture have become so good, in the last few years, at creating furniture that has great functional capabilities yet looks terrific.  It looks almost residential or like hospitality furniture.  But now, when you understand what the CDC guidelines require, the germicidal agents that hospitals are required to use will strip the paint off a car.  Just imagine using these after every patient, or even daily when the same patient is in the room…every day, cleaning the wood arms of a chair or upholstery fabrics with these highly caustic chemicals.  They are not going to last very long.  So what is the solution?  Is it a metal frame for that high-back patient chair?  C. difficile, for example, often causes diarrhea, which can be severe, and, in addition, you have a lot of bodily fluids, let’s say in a surgical unit.  How are you going to clean that adequately?  Do you want to be the next person who comes in and sits on that chair when the housecleaning staff has 10 to 12 minutes to clean that room in-between patients?

There are certain things that are obvious once someone tells you about it, but you may not have considered it before.  For example, going into the patient bathroom you are touching the door knob and every time the nurse goes in to empty the bed pan, she is touching it.  Visitors touch it.  That door knob is so contaminated.  The light switches and the faucets at the sink are similarly contaminated.  I wonder does housecleaning really go in and clean those faucets?  There are just certain things that we don’t think about.  Grab bars in the shower are a source of pathogen contact from one person to another.

When you read the nitty-gritty of it, in that chapter in the book, I think you are going to be shocked at the things that you never thought of.  The things that you thought you knew, but really didn’t, were really the biggest learning experience for me.  Once I started getting into it, I just couldn’t stop.  One night I stayed up through the night just going from one website to another reading about epidemiology and infection control.