Laundry is a potential carrier of infection and care homes and hospitals recognise that implementing a strict laundry process is vital to the comfort and welfare of their residents and patients.

European Guidelines
The European Standard for Biocontamination Control EN 14065 contains guidelines for Risk Analysis and Biocontamination Control (RABC). Applying these guidelines to your laundry assures continuous optimum hygiene of the laundered textiles, reducing the risk of infection to patients and staff.

They are just guidelines though and don’t give specific ideas on how to interpret them. With this in mind, we have used our 15 years experience in linen hygiene to put together a process based on the guidelines to provide you with the best defence against the spread of germs, bacteria and dust particles.

Minimal handling
The more you touch the clean linen the greater the risk of cross contamination. The key is to reduce handling by sorting your linen at the point of collection (ie the residents’ beds) into textile families. A textile family is not articles made of the same material, (or darks, and lights as at home), but items that are to be processed in the same way. This way clean linen doesn’t need to be sorted into tumble drying, ironing or hand finishing and handling is kept to a minimum (no more than 4 handlings)

By creating a functional separation between clean and soiled textiles the barrier laundry is the optimal way to ensure the highest standards of cleanliness and avoid the risk of cross contamination.

What is a barrier laundry?
With a barrier laundry, clean and dirty linen never come into contact with each other meaning cross contamination is avoided.

A Barrier washer extractor has two doors located on opposite sides of the machine. This allows the machine to be installed in a wall that divides two separate laundry rooms. Dirty linen is loaded into the machine in one room (the dirty side) and the clean linen is then unloaded into the other room (the clean side).

Both doors can never be opened at the same time and staff moving from the dirty side to the clean side must pass through a tiny room where contaminated gloves and gowns are removed and hands are thoroughly washed.

On a regular basis and at several stages of the laundering process, laundry staff measure the microbiological quality of the linen which should be lower than 12 colonies per 25 cm2.