Ricci: Commercial Laundry Linens Are Safe

Posted March 24, 2017 at 10:07 am

TRSA President and CEO Joseph Ricci recently wrote a cogent, factually based guest opinion for Becker’s Hospital Review that defended commercial laundries against unjustified claims made in a series of legal actions filed on behalf of patients at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). These lawsuits claim that linens were a source of the harmful Rhizopus mold blamed for their deaths.

“The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and Pennsylvania Department of Health did not implicate linens as a source of mold that infected the UPMC patients and both agencies stated they would not investigate further,” Ricci wrote in his column that appeared online on March 20. He added that, “As the facts of these cases continue to become apparent, we encourage hospitals and the healthcare community to rely on the extremely strong safety record and strong certification requirements of the commercial laundries that serve them.”

Ricci’s column included an overview of TRSA’s Hygienically Clean certification program for healthcare textiles, including bed and bath linens, scrubs, lab coats, gowns and similar items. This initiative is designed to provide an additional safeguard for the users of healthcare textiles. The program requires documented adherence to an array of laundry best-management practices for ensuring the quality and cleanliness of textile goods. Certified laundries also must pass periodic inspections of textiles to ensure that they are free of microbes capable of causing illnesses.

Ricci noted that due to these longstanding best practices, the number of cases in which authorities have implicated healthcare linens as a vector for disease is extraordinarily small – only 13 incidents worldwide since the ‘70s, out of the hundreds of tons of linens processed daily both here and abroad. Of this number, only three health-related incidents involving linens have occurred in the United States during that period. Hygienically Clean certification is designed to help laundries take that number to zero – and keep it there. Click here for details. 

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