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Three Tips for a Hygienic Medical Laboratory
Jun
Maintaining a sanitary and secure medical laboratory is especially essential for the health and well-being of your staff and patients. In addition, an uncluttered and hygienic lab is critical to maintaining your team’s morale and preventing the spread of infections and cross-contamination of specimen selections.
Clinical labs have costly and complicated equipment, large amounts of medical supplies, and several months’ worth of disposables. So it becomes vital that your lab is safe, clean, and well-organized. In addition, phlebotomists are usually liable for keeping their workplace secure and arranged, which is an essential job responsibility. Our experts on medical laboratory supplies recommend these things you can do to guarantee that the medical lab is always secure, sanitized, and systematic.
Stay Organized
A well-organized medical laboratory ensures that mishaps and accidents do not happen. A medical lab tech or phlebotomist ensures that specimens and samples collected are appropriately tagged and stored. In case of incorrect identification, an inaccurate diagnosis leads to faulty treatment. Such solemn errors frequently lead to lengthy, expensive lawsuits, so you must be cautious.
If your establishment is in an active hospital, there will consistently be an endless stream of patients filing in. Most carry self-identifying identifications, documents, or badges. In other circumstances, you can request details from the patient, an accompanying caregiver, family member, or nurse.
Once the representative samples are collected, you must store them correctly. Most bodily specimens need refrigeration when you don’t have diagnostic or testing installations in your laboratory. Occasionally patients bring urine samples gathered overnight or from a specific period. These specimens are typically collected from home with urine cups or products with urine transfer tubes. You must confirm that the sample is stored at the expected temperature and transported safely.
Waste Management is Critical
Medical diagnostic laboratories must stick to stringent waste management protocol. The ordinary wastes created in labs include material debris like used syringes and needles, wipes, cotton swabs, and other disposables. You must discard them in adequately labeled bins. In addition, sharp needles and glassware must be disposed of separately to evade injuries.
Biomedical wastes must be disposed of heeding strict guidelines and protocols. The government frequently applies regulations concerning the disposal of dangerous medical waste. There are distinct color-coded disposal units for harmful bodily wastes, including infectious materials, blood products, tainted supplies, and IV pipes. Medications past their expiration date, dangerous drugs, radioactive waste, and other disposables must be disposed of separately. Any defect or blunder in the proper disposal of biomedical waste at medical establishments can prove extremely hazardous or even deadly.
Ensure Cleanliness
A medical lab ought to be kept hygienic and germ-free. Therefore, it is essential to observe strict and infallible Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that guarantee zero infection outbreaks by removing contaminants and other infectious spills. Hospital-standard sanitizing solutions kill nearly all bacteria and help sanitize work surfaces, gear, and other medical laboratory supplies. While tending the office, it is essential to use high-quality vacuums fitted with High-Efficiency Particulate Absorption (HEPA) filters to ensure that even the tiniest micro-particles are cleared and the surfaces are clean.
