Usually, in this January column, I like to look ahead and talk about the outlook for the coming year. And as I look back at the last few of these that I’ve written, it seems I’ve usually been able to identify at least one
Tag Archives: Clean Rooms
State-of-the-art laundering gets garments clean enough for strictest environments
By Hank Hogan
Clothes make the man, the saying goes. The modern technological twist on that adage is that dirty garments can unmake the cleanroom. Since many of these garments are too expensive to be used only once, they have to be laundered. Now cleanroom operators in the Midwest have a new option, a recently completed facility that uses state-of-the-art techniques to get garments clean enough to help fabricate semiconductors, make pharmaceuticals, and paint cars.
Cintas Corp. (Cincinnati, OH) just opened up a new cleanroom laundry facility in Westland, MI. The 4,000-sq. ft. site has cleanrooms ranging in cleanliness from ISO Class 3 to 7, with different areas separated by process isolation controls. This arrangement is critically important, says Cintas corporate quality assurance manager Jan Eudy.
“You have a linear flow through your washing, drying, folding, and packaging process. But you want to be able to handle more than one customer’s garments at one point in time. So we have different process areas, depending upon the types of garments and the customer requirements,” she explains.
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Since human-generated contamination plays a large role in critical environments, special care must be taken to provide appropriate garments to minimize the human impact on the cleanroom. Other important factors include specialty fabrics to safeguard technicians, as well as proper laundering and care of reusable attire.
Compiled by Carrie Meadows
Coat aprons for splash protection
Ansell coat aprons offer medium- to heavy-duty splash protection specific to the food processing, laboratory, electronics, medical, pharmaceutical, and chemical processing industries. The series includes four versions that are made of the highest quality virgin vinyl in 6- and 8-mil thickness. Coat aprons are offered with dielectrically welded seams, which eliminate contaminant traps and permit cleaning to Fed. Std. 209E Class 100 standards. There are no exposed elastic or metal parts to create static or corrosion. Each garment has 40-mil PVC grommets permanently welded to the apron for greater strength and longer life.
Ansell
Red Bank, NJ
www.ansellpro.com
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Compiled by Carrie Meadows
Static-dissipative binders for critical environments
Desco now offers its line of ESD three-ring binders with static-dissipative clear overlay pockets. Insert covers or documents in pockets on the front, back, and spine. Interior pockets allow additional storage for quick and easy access. Interior and exterior vinyl surfaces are static dissipative and are suitable for handling documents in ESD-protected areas; any charge will be removed when the binder is grounded. The format is 8 1/2
By George Miller
Construction subcontractors’ lack of awareness of their surroundings is perhaps one of the most frustrating issues, from a contamination control point of view, faced by health-care facility managers.
One example: “Information technology subcontractors will come in to string cable,” says Dennis Tremblay, senior scientist specializing in building and life safety issues at the environmental and engineering consultancy Environmental Health & Engineering (EH&E; Needham, MA). “They start lifting ceiling tiles without regard for containment of the site.”
Tremblay, who is also fire safety manager at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and a certified fire protection specialist, has penned the second release of the 2006 document Infection Control in the Healthcare Environment During Construction. In the document, he finds that it is possible to provide a “standardized and effective” infection control risk assessment (ICRA) program that causes a minimum of disruption in hospitals, which somehow always seem to be under construction. The key is a database that aids in program management by allowing all key personnel access to ICRA documents, and providing infection control training before contractors are allowed on site.
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Patient mortality could be reduced by 17 percent and reliability of care could improve by nearly 13 percent if the not-for-profit hospitals participating in a nationwide collaborative attained the project’s quality goals, according to a recently released analysis.
QUEST is a voluntary, three-year project with 166 not-for-profit hospitals across 31 states designed to improve hospital performance levels. Using benchmarked data from the Premier health-care alliance’s clinical database, Premier and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) identified the main factors that lead to deaths, errors, and excessive costs.
The goals of QUEST are to improve the overall health of the patient population by reducing health-care acquired infections (HAIs), adverse events, and mortality; eliminating waste while ensuring appropriate care; and enhancing patient satisfaction with care.
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In findings recently published on the New England Journal of Medicine web site, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the cause of serious adverse reactions reported in late 2007 were due to heparin contaminated with oversulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS). In the study, “Outbreak of Adverse Reactions Associated with Contaminated Heparin,” CDC identified 152 adverse reactions associated with heparin in 113 patients from Nov. 19, 2007 through Jan. 31, 2008.
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Medical device manufacturers can benefit from innovative surface analysis techniques to help them identify and quantify contaminants on devices, but only if they are willing and able to share information about what the device is made of, where it’s been, and what might be causing the contamination.
By Sarah Fister Gale
Surface contamination plagues manufacturers in every clean industry despite their best efforts to prevent equipment, air, and operators from collecting and distributing contaminants on delicate surface structures. Molecular-sized particles of organic and inorganic matter can wreak havoc in any clean industry
What the heck are they teaching at the university business schools these days? Apparently, based on the brain trusts now running most of the world’s banks and corporations, it’s a curriculum pretty lean on economics and sound business practices and with a heavy emphasis on political science. I guess that only makes sense these days, though, since politicians are now pretty much calling the shots in our “free-enterprise system” anyway.
One thing I do know, however, is that whatever nonsense is being spun in the lecture halls, one simple truth will remain intact: Things have value, and some things have more value than others. A Japanese or German car, for example, has more value than an American car. That’s got nothing to do with nationalism or marketing, it’s just a fact, based on years of personal experience and comparison by consumers. And it’s a fact based on the conscious decision of American car executives to sacrifice quality and company reputations for a quick buck. Anyone remember the Vega, the Pinto, the K-car? Probably not too many. You’d have to have been around a while, because they didn’t stay on the road long.
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Merging contamination control technology with garment comfort and ease of use reduces the risks to cleanroom operations
By Sarah Fister Gale
When people are uncomfortable, they get annoyed. They fidget, they get distracted, and they adjust whatever is irritating them to make it go away. Anyone who’s ever worn a cleanroom bunny suit knows this is true. Although it has an impact on garment compliance, the makers of cleanroom garments have largely ignored this uncomfortable reality