Ideas That Work: Set a Mark for Your Germ-Zapping Robot on the Ceiling

X FACTOR Mark the OR ceiling with electrical tape to let your environmental services team know precisely where to position the UV disinfecting robot.

Set a Mark for Your Germ-Zapping Robot on the Ceiling

You need to reposition some UV whole-room disinfection robots so that they disinfect surfaces that are hidden by shadows or outside their direct line of sight. To save time moving our robots, we mapped out each of our 4 ORs to measure the exact spot where to place the robot so we could run it the least number of times while still disinfecting the entire room, from one wall to the other.

After we found the right cross coordinates, we needed some kind of marker so our housekeeping staff wouldn't have to just go by memory. We started with little smiley-face stickers on the overhead beams, but we evolved from there by using pieces of electrical tape, each one in the shape of an X — as in "X marks the spot" — on the ceiling.

The radius of the disinfecting UV light is 8 feet, for a total diameter of 16 feet, and the light kills C. diff in 5 minutes. Three of our 4 ORs have 4 points of contact, and the one smaller OR has 3 points of contact. So factoring in a 35-second "grace period" to begin each disinfection cycle, we figure 27 minutes to clean the 3 bigger rooms and a little more than 20 minutes for the smaller one. We'll remove the tape and replace it about once a month or so.

After our first year of adding UV disinfection to our cleaning protocol, things are going well. We've also expanded our use of the robots to disinfect other parts of our campus, like the public restrooms and the nurses' lounge. Our thinking is that we have the units here, so we might as well rev up our use of them so we can maximize the benefits.

Raphael Moore
Olean (N.Y.) General Hospital
[email protected]