Hospitals, nursing homes, and the healthcare industry as a whole use thousands of bedsheets, towels, patient gowns, and more every day. Keeping these linens clean is critically important. In the past, most healthcare facilities used their own laundry machines for convenience and to make sure everything was sanitized. However, outsourcing the laundry has become more popular in recent years as healthcare linen services rose to prominence.
Considering an outside laundry service for your healthcare facility? Here are 4 reasons to make the switch. Share on XWhy Should Your Healthcare Center Outsource Linen Care?
Keeping linen care in-house is possible, but can easily use up money and time that could be better spent caring for patients. Find a laundry service you can trust to take care of your hospital linens while you focus on more critical work. A few key benefits of outsourcing linen services include:
- Less money spent on laundry
- More room to house patients
- Convenience
- Guarantee of cleanliness
1) Less Money Spent on Laundry
To prevent the spread of disease, hospital linens must be washed thoroughly in industrial-strength washing machines and dryers. These machines can easily cost more than $5000 each, not to mention the cost of maintenance and the electricity required to keep them running all day. Outsourcing a laundry service means that your facility spends less money on keeping these machines running and just pays a set price to hand the laundry off.
2) More Room to House Patients
Not only are those industrial washing machines expensive, but they’re also massive. Between their size and the sheer number required to keep up with all the soiled linens a hospital produces, your laundry room takes up a huge amount of valuable space that could be better used to house patients. With an outsourced service, the need for a laundry room is eliminated.
Pro Tip: Outsourcing linen services frees your healthcare staff to spend more time working with patients. Let someone else worry about the laundry.
3) Convenience
At first glance, in-house laundry may appear more convenient than handing the linens off to someone else. However, outsourcing healthcare laundry can actually make things much simpler for a hospital. You give bags of dirty linens to an outside party, and they come back sanitized, folded, and ready for reuse. Your facility will end up spending far less valuable time and effort on specialized linen care.
4) Guarantee of Cleanliness
Obviously, cleanliness in a hospital environment is absolutely critical. Spreading even the slightest contamination could make a bad situation even worse. Thankfully, many laundry services go to great pains to make their clients’ linens as clean as possible. Many advertise themselves as adhering to high cleanliness standards, such as those set by the Joint Commission. You can be confident that your hospital’s bed linens will come back fully sanitized and safe to use.
How Linen Services Can Help Your Facility
Having an outside healthcare linen service doesn’t guarantee your hospital will be better than one with an in-house laundry room, but it can certainly boost patient care and satisfaction. At Wilkins Linen, we provide top-notch linen care for our customers. Hiring a laundry service is a perfectly legitimate, cost-effective way to ensure your hospital provides the best care possible.
Join the conversation to speak with our team of linen experts about what other healthcare facilities did with their linens.
