Ultimate Guide To Designing A Decontamination Room
It is essential for healthcare personnel to separate decontamination work from clinical duty despite space constraints. Reusable equipment must be separately sterilized and decontaminated to ascertain proper safety precautions for your clients. It helps to contain any sort of infection and prevent its spread. Let us find out the factors to consider while designing a decontamination room for your dental practice.
Layout
There should be temporal and physical segregation to ensure a proper decontamination process. This ensures a proper workflow from the dirty phase to the clean phase. This helps
Temporal Segregation
If the decontamination room is the same that is used for patient consultation, then there should be separate areas within the room. It should be kept as far from the dental chair as possible. There could be separate sinks far away from the consultation area, where reprocessing could be carried on. The room should have proper ventilation or air extraction. However, this is only a temporary solution and a separate room has to be built for carrying out this work. As your dental practice improves and reaches higher levels, it is only safe to separate the decontamination and treatment area.
Physical Segregation
If there is a separate decontamination room, then there should be enhanced dirty-clean separation. It is best if there could be two separate rooms. One room for appliances awaiting decontamination and another one where clean instruments are kept for use. The intention is only to avoid recontamination and separate the dirty and clean areas. There should be adequate ventilation in this space as well. There should be proper air movement and ventilation can also be provided through extraction units.
Flooring & Surface Area
A decontamination area should have worktops that can be easy to clean. Let us look at certain factors to keep in mind while focusing on flooring and surface area.
- Easy to clean surfaces
- The dirty zone must have dedicated benches only for the decontamination process
- A dedicated cleaning area with proper lighting
- Floors should not be slippery and must be continuous
The environment should be such that there is no recontamination of the sterilized dental appliances.
Proper Equipment
A decontamination room requires a sterilizer for disinfection purposes. This should be kept far away from other areas of activity. The equipment from the sterilizer should be unloaded in a clean area. There should be a washbasin for the staff as well.
Fabric
It is best to not use any sort of fabric in a decontamination room. Instead, fitted blinds should be used for this area.
We hope this blog has provided you with the required information. Looking for the best contractors to design your decontamination room in Homer Glen, IL? Visit us at The Modern Dentist and choose from our wide range of services.