Rawlinson, Stacey;
(2022)
The Science of Cleaning and Decontamination.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Healthcare associated infections (HCAIs) are a growing issue and represent a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Any patient within the clinical space is at risk, though patients undergoing invasive procedures and admitted to intensive treatment units are at an even greater risk of acquiring HCAIs. An increase in antimicrobial resistance means some HCAIs are becoming more difficult to treat, therefore it is critical any source of HCAI is identified and addressed, not limited to hand hygiene alone. Historically, surfaces and the environment were deemed to play a negligible role in the transmission of HCAIs. It is now clear that surfaces do play an important role, and good environmental cleaning and hand hygiene are critical to prevent this surface-mediated transmission. We know that hand hygiene saves lives. This has been a topic of debate since the mid-1800s and there are large-scale interventions, audit re-audit studies to improve hand hygiene, with large supportive governmental funding. With environmental surfaces, however, conflicting evidence and determination of wider surfaces being non-critical has left surfaces as a forgotten entity. While, at the same time, HCAI is on the rise. The end goal of this thesis is to provide healthcare professionals with the tools needed to clean and assess their surfaces effectively to reduce HCAI. In order to do so, through a number of experiments and literature assessments, this thesis sought to address the issue of knowing how to sample surfaces, with all the different and sometimes contradictory literature on surface sampling devices, often in an inaccessible format. To address this gap, as well as sampling device testing to contribute to the literature, a literature review of surface
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The Science of Cleaning and Decontamination |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Civil, Environ and Geomatic Eng UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10151145 |
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