Extract: The care and maintenance of laboratories are one of the primary responsibilities to serve to raise awareness about healthcare-associated infections. Hence, disinfection and sterilization are enormously essential for ensuring that lab materials and equipment don’t transmit pathogens and viruses further to people. Health-care policies must incorporate and identify primarily measures to indicate sterilization and disinfection based on the items intended to use.
Numerous studies across countries have documented fewer compliance protocols, and the guidelines for disinfection and sanitizing and the failure of this has given birth to many outbreaks. A pragmatic approach to the proper use of disinfection process must be well-framed while assessing the efficiency of the methods.
Disinfection and its Usual Standards;
It is an incorporation of processes that eliminates many pathogenic microbes, germs, and other types of viruses on decontaminated surfaces. In health care settings, equipment and materials are getting disinfected with chemicals and wet solutions where many factors can calculate and limit the efficacy of the process.
Moreover, factors that led to the efficiency of these processes have a significant focus on the object’s physical nature, temperature and pH value of the disinfectant, time-exposure to the antiseptic, and even the humidity of the process. However, this is entirely inconsiderate to the cleaning methods. Since it can remove only the dust articles from objects and surfaces, using water and other detergents manually accomplish the minimal objectivity of the cleansing process. Intense cleaning is required before any level of disinfection and sanitizing because the dirt on the surfaces could interfere with the operation of disinfection by reducing the efficacy of the process further.
Liquid Chemical Sanitizing and Disinfection level;
Health care personnel are mainly keeping the continuous use of the chemical infused sprays and the high-level disinfectants to sterilize the contaminated instruments particularly. Inconsistent processes could distort the goals of the sterilization method, which depicts that the human error should be quite minimal to reduce the issues. Therefore, every step should facilitate the quality outputs by executing an evolving plan that continually enhances while minimizing the waste residue. Before any of the processes is moved and implemented, devices must be completely merged in the solutions for a specified time, temperature, and the humidity level with the right amount of concentration levels. The chemicals in use should be thoroughly validated before each use and eliminate if any error is there. It is also kept in check to wear the appropriate protective equipment for use as and when the chemical sterilant is in induction to prevent any skin or eye contact with the chemical.
Health care personnel should be advised with education on safety measures and compliance, informed about the hazards associated with the sterilant and disinfectant they are working with to clean off the tools. In general, a lot of preventive checks must be kept in consideration to avoid any complications that can arise due to the direct contact with liquid chemicals.
Time to Execute Efficient Disinfection:
In contrast to sterilization, disinfection requires 10-30 minutes of its application on the surfaces, usually is 6-10 hours in the former. Laboratories that need secure protocols must inculcate other extreme measures too. The presence of any organic material present on the surface ideally is removed from the surface, which can increase the efficacy of the disinfection process. However, the typical approach to decontaminate the surface is to wet the surface for some interval to a few hours considering the surface and the temperature. Hence, it can be tough and time-consuming for the personnel involved.
Whether All Disinfectants are Secured;
The effectiveness of targeting the germs must be in analysis while considering the health of the personnel. May disinfectants are harmful to the people and can cause various skin, eye, and respiratory illnesses. Besides, it can rupture the safety of the equipment and the surfaces by leaving the harmful residues as well.
Few studies also depict that the disinfection process just cleans about a minimum of 50% surface even if all the protocols are in use thoroughly. It can result in the multiplication of the germs rather than eradicated and proving the cleaning outcomes to be weak and unreliable.
What Other Processes are effective instead?
Realizing all the issues and the outcomes attached to the usual and manual disinfection carried in the medicinal or surgical companies, few other technologies in the form of UV light disinfection are into the practice, which is quite familiar and in use since 20th century.
Its usage is mainly to disinfect the large-scale industries and treating the water; however, due to its much-extended technological advancements, extensive use of UV light is included to improve disinfection results. It is a great way to reduce infection rates substantially without leaving harmful residues.
How is UV technology different?
UV light generates on a wavelength of 248 nm that can terminate the growth of all sorts of micro-organisms. To be precise, UV is a spectrum of light that falls between visible and x-ray light and has the potential to act as germicidal due to its anti-microbial property. It stops the reproduction of the germs by destroying the DNA and the nuclei cells of the bacteria and thereby reducing infections. UV disinfectant system incurs many advantages which makes it a safer and efficient choice when compared to other manual disinfection methods;
– A Chemical Free Approach: Unlike the standard disinfecting system, it doesn’t contaminate surfaces in the laboratories with any chemicals which can protect the health care staff from the infections caused by the residues.
– Low-Maintenance Required: Other chemical disinfectants can have safety and maintenance troubles; however, in the case of UV light, once installed around the environment, it can be used and maintained for a long time as its functions efficiently. This technology offers long-term benefits because of its low maintenance requirement as you save on time and money.
– Pathogens can’t build Immunity: Bacteria and viruses are more susceptible to disinfectant agents, which represents more vulnerability, and health care personnel’s health can be affected. Whereas UV light provides a secure method of killing bacteria, which further examines no immunity, build up.
Future of UV light:
In the United States, more than 5,000 health care facilities which are nearly 10% of the acute medicinal laboratories have already adopted the UV technology to elevate the disinfection process and leave no room for the hazards. Airlines and other large-scale industries are also anticipating self-cleaning laboratories as these industries believe that it has a firm place in the area of enhancing the efficacy.
The UV disinfection market is evolving more since no-touch disinfection processes are high in existence to prevent other health-related problems that manual cleaning might cause.
Conclusion:
With the ever-growing technology in disinfecting purposes, it is now entirely possible to incorporate UV technology in a more advanced way than ever before and hence creating the best solutions to combat the harmful germs present in the environment, primarily used with the composition of other cleaning processes.
The risks that the laboratories and the health care facilities are currently undergoing with the methods of disinfection, UV light should be highly considered as an essential addition to increasing the standards of the sanitizing and disinfecting tools and machines.
