Abstract
BackgroundPortable Medical Equipment (PME) such as workstations-on-wheels (WOWs) and vital signs machines (VMs) have been linked to healthcare-associated infections. Routine visual monitoring of PME disinfection is difficult. An automated Disinfection Tracking System (DTS) was used to record and report the number of disinfection events of PME in a hospital setting. MethodsThe study was conducted in 2 acute-care units for 25-days to determine the pattern of recorded events from DTS on PME. Devices record disinfection events as moisture events and automatically store on a central database. DTS devices with “screen-on” feedback and “screen-off” devices with no display were placed on 10 WOWs and 5 VMs on separate units. ResultsA total of 421 moisture events were recorded for the “screen-on” and 345 for the “screen-off”, during the 25-day implementation period on the 2 different hospital units. The highest number of events occurred between 6:00am-7:00am, with 69 & 75 moisture events recorded for Units 1 and 2, respectively. ConclusionsThe pattern of disinfection events for WOWs and VMs demonstrated that most events occurred regularly at the times corresponding with nursing shift change. The DTS has the potential to continuously record, and report data related to PME disinfection.
Highlights
Portable Medical Equipment (PME) such as workstations-on-wheels (WOWs) and vital signs machines (VMs) have been linked to healthcare-associated infections
Nursing shift changes on the study units occur between 6:00-8:00 AM, 2:00-3:00 PM, and 6:00-8:00 PM. (Fig 3) Figure 3 data peaks include all device data and disinfection events gathered from all units and shows 3 peaks corresponding with a spike in disinfection events
When individual PME item patterns were binned and graphed by hour (Fig 4) the spike in disinfection events was more visible for WOWs than for VMs
Summary
Portable Medical Equipment (PME) such as workstations-on-wheels (WOWs) and vital signs machines (VMs) have been linked to healthcare-associated infections. Results: A total of 421 moisture events were recorded for the “screen-on” and 345 for the “screen-off”, during the 25-day implementation period on the 2 different hospital units. Portable Medical Equipment (PME) such as workstation-onwheels (WOWs) and vital signs machines (VMs) are routinely used by healthcare workers (HCWs) for patient care.[1,2] Transmission of healthcare-associated infections has been attributed to PME and more than 50% of high-touch surfaces in a hospital room are often overlooked during manual cleaning.[1,3,4,5,6,7,8] Contaminated shared PME have been linked to the transmission of Clostridioides difficile (C. diff), Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), Enterobacter cloacae
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