Why Use a Certified Laundry?
The stakeholders in your business are increasingly concerned about its commitment to product cleanliness. They need to be assured of your efforts to maximize safety and health. You require as much verified proof as possible to demonstrate that you are achieving these goals.
Using a Hygienically Clean certified laundry contributes mightily to this endeavor:
- Textile services companies that earn the Hygienically Clean designation have turned to a third party to attest to their business practices that prevent laundered goods from becoming a source of contamination.
- Conformance by textile services operations to this internationally recognized standard for hygiene reflects high performance in multiple aspects of laundering. Certified operations have mastered responsive and timely customer service as well as excellent goods quality.
A textile services operation that earns Hygienically Clean certification and maintains TRSA membership is committed to high productivity and workplace safety rates, achieving the highest levels of excellence in these metrics as well as efficiency, cleanliness and environmental protection. TRSA members report their best practices collectively to benchmark (foster improvement) individually.
The new economy demands more scientific assessments of the health impacts of management practices. Your use of a Hygienically Clean certified laundry indicates your personal conscientiousness and willingness to perform to the highest standards in matters related to all these issues.
When hospitals and other healthcare facilities review linen, uniform and facility services options, every laundry under consideration should be Hygienically Clean Healthcare certified. The certification reflects laundries’ commitment to best management practices (BMPs) in laundering as verified by third-party inspection and their capability to produce hygienically clean textiles as quantified by ongoing microbial testing. A laundry’s dedication to compliance and processing healthcare linens and garments using BMPs as described in its quality assurance documentation (QA) is confirmed. QA is the focus of inspectors’ evaluation of critical control points to minimize risk.
Laundries pass three rounds of outcome-based microbial testing, indicating that their processes are producing Hygienically Clean Healthcare linens and garments and zero presence of harmful bacteria. To maintain certification, laundry plants must pass quarterly testing to ensure that as laundry conditions change, such as water quality, textile fabric composition and wash chemistry, laundered product quality is consistently maintained.
This process eliminates subjectivity by focusing on outcomes and results that verify textiles cleaned in these facilities meet appropriate hygienically clean standards and BMPs for hospitals, surgery centers, medical offices, nursing homes and other medical facilities.
Hygienically Clean Healthcare certification acknowledges laundries’ effectiveness in protecting healthcare operations through testing and inspections that scrutinize quality control procedures in textile services operations related to the handling of textiles containing blood and other potentially infectious materials.
Hygienically Clean Healthcare certified laundries use processes, chemicals and BMPs acknowledged by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, American National Standards Institute and others. Introduced in 2012, Hygienically Clean Healthcare brought to North America the international cleanliness standards for healthcare linens and garments used worldwide by the Certification Association for Professional Textile Services and the European Committee for Standardization.
Objective experts in epidemiology, infection control, nursing and other healthcare professions work with launderers to ensure the certification continues to enforce the highest standards for producing clean healthcare textiles.
Processes, chemicals or procedures to achieve BMPs are not stipulated – only that whatever protocols the laundry deems appropriate are documented and practiced. Hygienically Clean Healthcare certified laundries are free to practice whatever tactics are needed to meet Minimum Performance Specifications for bacteriological testing. But they must document their tactics including written quality control procedures.