A study published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology shows that increasing the amount of time spent on terminal cleaning of patient rooms may not have a significant effect on disinfecting high-touch surfaces.
Researchers conducted the study at an acute care Veterans Affairs hospital in Temple, Texas. They included single-occupancy rooms previously occupied for at least 48 hours before discharge. They collected pre-and post-cleaning samples from five high-touch surfaces, including the bedrail and call button, and they sampled all the rooms for aerobic bacterial colony counts.
Researchers placed cleaning time data into three categories:
• Limited arm, wherein terminal cleaning was restricted to 25 minutes
• Unrestricted-moderate arm, wherein cleaning took less than 45 minutes
• Unrestricted-high arm, wherein cleaning took 45 minutes or more
Researchers studied 225 samples from the limited arm category; 55 samples from the unrestricted-moderate arm; and 170 from the unrestricted-high arm. They found that terminal cleaning beyond 25 minutes did not affect disinfection on high-touch surfaces as measured by aerobic bacterial colony counts.