Tuesday 13 August 2019
The island's largest non-commercial on-site laundry, situated at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital, is undergoing an upgrade.
The hospital's laundry is an essential service that works to support every aspect of Health & Social Care's operations, from the cleaning and pressing of items that are used for hospital bedding, to staff scrubs and uniforms. The laundry also caters for other emergency services.
Darryl Corbin, Catering, Housekeeping & Laundry manager at the PEH said: "My team are really happy with the works completed, which have made a real difference to the way we can deliver our services to the organisation. The new machines and layout will allow us to make further improvements to how we work and the services we provide."
Some 1.2 million items a year are processed through the laundry, equivalent to 4,615 items a day, attended to by a dedicated team of 16 staff. They receive on average 1,700 kilos of used laundry every day which are then separated for a series of processes, including barrier washes for heavily soiled laundry that must be laundered at high temperatures, service washes, drying and pressing.
Efforts have also been made to make the laundry as energy efficient as possible. Heat and steam from the nearby clinical waste incinerator are used directly by the laundry. This reduces the demand on energy overall and supports Health & Social Care's intention to improve the overall environmental impact of processing 442 tonnes of laundry every year.
Installation of the new laundry equipment, including washing machines, dryers and a tunnel finisher was carried out by the HSC Estates Team.
These machines range in size from a 90 kilo barrier washing machine, three 70 kilo front-loading washer extractors and three 30 kilo front-loading service wash machines, a 50 kilo capacity tumble dryer and tunnel finisher which can process 100-150 garments per hour.
There have also been many other improvements made to the laundry's critical infrastructure and the project had to comply with infection prevention and control protocols and processes.
