Copper and silver ionisation and L8guard is a great recipe for Legionella control in water systems.
Legionella and Pseudomonas control at Croydon Health Services
An article in the Hospital Bulletin gives Michael Parkhill’s account of Legionella and Pseudomonas control at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust. Michael Parkhill*, he Estates General Manager told Hospital Bulletin: “Through our routine water testing we were finding water quality issues in certain areas. However, we were unable to identify if this was because they were a low-use water outlet that hadn’t been flushed.
“As we use ProEconomy’s copper and silver ionisation system (Orca System) as our biocidal control it’s important to ensure that the water is drawn through each outlet to ensure the copper and silver ions reach all areas of the system”. We didn’t have a means of recording the risk assessments that had been carried out on low-use outlets and, if these required flushing, that the flushing had taken place. This gave us problems when trying to determine the root cause.”
Mike explained: “We were looking for solutions and came across L8guard. This is a web-based software system that goes a long way to solving these problems. I invited L8guard’s designer and developer Tim Moore of Digital Missives to site. “Tim gave a demonstration of L8guard to my team and infection prevention and control. We were all very impressed with the audit-ability of it – it tells you everything.
“The other beauty of L8guard is that the reports are circulated monthly to the estates team, all the infection prevention and control team, and all senior nurses and matrons. Therefore, they can see how their areas have performed. Every department has someone who is tasked with carrying out the risk assessment, performing any flushing, and reporting it on an agreed schedule via L8guard as being complete. It’s done twice a week, flushing each low-use water outlet for two minutes.”
What Is L8guard?
L8guard will automatically generate and send out performance reports and graphs identifying areas of success and concern. It sill also highlight ‘repeat offenders’, enabling any localised problems to be addressed quickly and easily.
The Pseudomonas module expands this function into the daily flushing of pre-identified outlets. It follows a similar process, but all reminders, escalations and failure warnings are contained within a day. We test daily for Pseudomonas, said Mike. “This is done as per the HTM on augmented care areas and a clinical risk assessment is performed. L8guard covers all this too.”
“Through using L8guard to report low-use water outlet issues and carrying out routine sampling for copper and silver, it makes it very easy for us to identify if water quality issues are due to low-use outlets not being flushed or other problems with the system. L8guard also helps by saving time and money, and the re-testing by having all the information to hand.”
Mike said: “Through using the L8guard module and ProEconomy’s silver copper ionisation system we have reduced our positive Pseudomonas results from 50% to around 2%. These are very low results when they are positive. Both systems have been amazing against Pseudomonas.”
*Since this interview, Michael Parkhill has become assistant director of estates at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.
