Avoiding surface contamination

Biosecurity is critical in a wide range of healthcare-related sectors, from pharmaceutical manufacturing to hospital wards. While worktops and equipment surfaces are routinely cleaned in these environments, there is another potential source of contamination that is often overlooked – the switches and control panels used to operate equipment. These ‘high traffic’ surfaces are routinely operated by staff wearing protective gloves, and represent a significant contamination risk. A novel antimicrobial technology is helping to improve the biosecurity of electrical components, offering guaranteed protection against surface contamination. 

Antimicrobial resistance is now a global concern, with new resistance mechanisms emerging and spreading at an increasing rate. This not only increases the risk to patients in a clinical setting, it also adds to the cost of healthcare provision through lengthier hospital stays and more complex care requirements. The search for new antibiotics has, so far, made little progress, and alternative strategies such as phage therapies are still in the early stages of development. Strict antimicrobial stewardship and enhanced biosecurity measures are currently the only tools available to combat this growing problem. 

Preventing transmission of resistant pathogen strains between individual patients is crucial to limiting the spread of newly-occurring antimicrobial resistance mechanisms, which is why the use of alcohol-based hand gels and wipes has become second nature within a hospital setting, not just for medical professionals, but also for many patients and their visitors. Routine cleaning of equipment – both between individual patients and on a more structured rota – is obviously essential to prevent microbial colonisation, but could instrument designers do more to help prevent this type of contamination?