INFECTION CONTROL
Image courtesy of Your Health Griffith
Cleaning your practice's 'sneeze screens' What's required to clean the ‘COVID-19 installed’ screens? It has been great to see general practices find inventive ways to protect staff. Reception area screens are now a standard sight in clinics throughout Australia with the likes of plastic manufacturing companies, practice managers, handypersons and DIY husbands and wives rolling up their sleeves to build and install these useful fixtures. Now that these screens are well and truly a feature of general practice reception areas, it needs to be ensured that they are thoroughly and correctly cleaned to meet the RACGP Standards for general practices 5th edition. Cleaning these screens falls under Criteria GP1.1 – Responsive system for patient care, and GP4.1 – Infection prevention and control, including sterilisation. Your infection control policy should cover the environmental cleaning of clinical and non-clinical areas of the practice. Managing the risk of cross-infection in your practice must be minimised and practice team members need to know how to implement standard and transmission-based precautions, spills management and environmental cleaning.
5
SPRING 2020
Per the Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Infection in Healthcare1, a two-step clean would be suitable to clean your screens2. Your two-step clean should involve a physical clean using a detergent followed by disinfection with a Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)-listed hospital-grade disinfectant3 with specific claims, or a chlorine-based product such as sodium hypochlorite, where indicated for use. Physical (mechanical or manual) cleaning is the most important step in cleaning. Per these guidelines, the sole reliance on a disinfectant, such as household-grade anti-bacterial spray, without physical cleaning, is not recommended as it will not sufficiently kill COVID-19.
