Kaivac Inc. Love In The Janitorial Closet America’s largest public health care facility fell in love with no-touch cleaning. T The University of Southern California Medical Center in East Los Angeles is one of the nation’s largest — and busiest — public hospitals. In one year, the hospital, which employs approximately 9,000 people, treats more than 800,000 patients. With this many people, “all the con-cerns about controlling the spread of infection and cross-contamination are multiplied a thousand fold here,” says Bill Walton, the center’s director of environ-mental services. Because of this, Walton was looking for a more effective way to clean the hos-pital’s common area restrooms, which must be serviced three to four times per eight-hour shift. He says traditional restroom cleaning methods involving rags, sprayers, mops, buckets and brooms are slow. Worse yet, we now know that mops and rags spread germs and bacteria as they become soiled; in effect, they are contributing to the problem, not alleviat-ing it. Because of these concerns about cross-contamination, Walton not only wanted a system that could hygienically clean the hospital’s restrooms, but one that also required very little touching of fixtures and surfaces. He decided to transfer to one of the smaller No-Touch Cleaning ® Systems developed by Kaivac Inc. of Hamilton, Ohio. With these systems, chemicals are applied to all surfaces to be cleaned. The same areas are then pressure rinsed, similar to using an indoor pres-sure washer, which loosens and blasts away contaminants. The final step is to vacuum up the moisture as well as germs, bacteria and soils so that they are completely removed from the restroom area. “Because it’s a no-touch system, our people don’t have to hand scrub toilets or urinals, wash down walls or mop floors,” states Walton. “It is proving to be safer for our staff and far more effective than the old conventional cleaning meth-ods. Further, odor problems have been eliminated, which tells me odor-causing bacteria has been washed away.” Walton also believes the system is fast-er than conventional cleaning methods. Faster cleaning times have actually been verified by ISSA, whose studies indicate the no-touch system, which they refer to as “spray-and-vacuum” cleaning, is at least a third faster than conventional mop, bucket, sprayer and rag cleaning. “Using the Kaivac [system] helps elimi-nate cross-contamination, it’s faster and my people really love the machine,” pro-claims Walton. “In fact, I’ve heard clean-ing workers are always falling in love with their Kaivac. Now, I know it is true.” CM Circle Product Information no. 151 This content was provided by Kaivac as part of a paid advertisement. For more information, please contact Kaivac at 1-800-287-1136 or www.Kaivac.com. www.cmmonline.com 39
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