IV Pumps

[mcockerham]

How many of you work in a hospital where the IV Pumps are left in the patient rooms or on the nursing unit and cleaned by the Housekeeping staff instead of being returned to Central Service for processing. Any replies will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

[djw]

We had cleaned pumps, commodes, and most all other patient equip. for all the years (15) I have worked in CS. Recently, our hospial underwent renovation and addition. Due to some of the distances now required to bring equip. to decontam., the equip. now stays on the floor and is cleaned by housekeeping. We only receive commodes so they can go through the washer. We had concerns about this, but they are being cleaned as well, and with the same cleaning solutions, they were cleaned with in decontam. There haven't been any complaints, and we have to assume this system is working well until we hear otherwise.

[sonny1388]

I have not seen any of the pumps come down to decontam in the three years I have worked in C.S. Haven't seen any bedpans, either. The only things that we see that aren't instrumentation are beds that come down from PACU (found they clean very easily in the cart wash) and wire shelves from the kitchen (again, much easier than trying to do it by hand).

[doc7592]

We had cleaned pumps, commodes, and most all other patient equip. for all the years (15) I have worked in CS. Recently, our hospial underwent renovation and addition. Due to some of the distances now required to bring equip. to decontam., the equip. now stays on the floor and is cleaned by housekeeping. We only receive commodes so they can go through the washer. We had concerns about this, but they are being cleaned as well, and with the same cleaning solutions, they were cleaned with in decontam. There haven't been any complaints, and we have to assume this system is working well until we hear otherwise.

Do you have a policy for this?
We clean pumps and pca pumps.

[New CSD Tech]

Our hospital cleans the pumps and SCD machines in decontam. We are a large facility, and it is often quite a distance to travel with dirty equipment. The problem we often encounter is that there is not enough equipment to go around when are census is high. When this happens, sometimes the floors will clean equipment themselves, but it may not be properly done.

[HRJohn]

We had SPD clean the pumps for years, but recently tried to switch away from centralized cleaning of pumps and other DME.

We got a new director and she felt it would be better to have the pumps cleaned up on the units by EVS.

It seemed like a good idea, but we had a few problems with this, and ended up switching back to centralized cleaning.

One problem was that the biomed expiration tags were not getting checked. We had 30 or so different housekeepers doing the cleaning, and it was hard to enforce the checking of the tags.

The other problem was the uneven distribution of the pumps.

Without a centralized system to get the right number of pumps to the floors that needed them, we kept having some floors running out of pumps, while other floors had a surplus of them.

Not all patients use the same number of pumps, so each unit needs a fluctuating number of them on any given day. It takes a significantly larger inventory to have spares available on every floor to handle the unit's maximum potential need.

It sure seemed like a no-brainer, but it turned out to be more complicated than we thought :o .

[keith]

the hospital that I work at. I am in charge of all the IV pumps. When they need cleaning I clean them, when they have some simple thing wrong with them I take care of it. If you send me a email in the morning at: keith.wood2@HCAhealthcare.com I will send you more information on the job title that I have.