Ideas That Work: Wipes With Colored Additive Get Better Cleaning Results

Practical pearls from your colleagues

The environmental services (EVS) team at Griffin Hospital in Derby, Conn., found that using a product that turns their standard wipes from white to blue resulted in rooms that were nearly 70% cleaner than before. The switch also resulted in dropping the per-room cleanup time by more than two minutes.

First, the EVS team used regular disinfectant wipes, the hospital’s usual practice, in 10 randomly selected rooms for a week. Then the staff was educated about a product that has a plastic lid with the color additive that attaches to existing wipe containers. The additive goes onto the wipes as they are pulled from the container as usual.

The color fades to clear when the wipes have been used for the appropriate length of contact time required for the disinfectant in the wipes to be effective. This creates a strong visual cue to help users self-monitor their compliance and to see what has been cleaned with effective technique and what has not.

When the EVS team used the new product in another 10 random rooms for a week, the results were significant. An analysis of microbes that remained after cleaning showed that the second set of rooms were 69.2% cleaner than the ones cleaned with the standard wipes. And the time spent cleaning the rooms decreased from 39.1 to 36.8 minutes.

“Collectively, our results show that providing a simple visual cue makes an enormous difference in room cleanliness, and it seems to allow cleaning teams to be a bit more efficient in the room turnover process as well,” says Olayinka Oremade, MD, MPH, CIC, Griffin Hospital’s infection control manager. OSM