What handwashing station is best for your hygiene program?

Managing a hygiene program is a huge undertaking. Designing a hygiene zone, picking the right equipment, and then validating that it meets your hand and footwear hygiene standards is a lot of work. Fortunately, a partner in hygiene excellence can help you overcome these challenges. In this blog, we explore the challenge of selecting the proper handwashing stations for your hygiene program and how CleanTech® Plus helps.

What handwashing station will ensure hygiene program success?

For quality and operational managers, the design of the hygiene zone often falls on their shoulders. From meeting regulatory requirements to picking PPE, these managers not only have to design processes that ensure effective throughput and mitigate cross-contamination risk, but also are responsible for pulling together the appropriate equipment and resources needed to support that design. Due to the incredible amount of time and energy required to ensure effective facility and hygiene zone design, equipment selection can often take a back seat, resulting in a hodgepodge hygienic zone where flow and employee behavior cannot meet your expectations.

A key factor in the design of a hygiene zone is the equipment selected to support the critical control points where hygiene events are designed to occur. This directly impacts the success of your hygiene program. A well-designed hygiene zone with the wrong types of hygiene equipment in it can severely impact throughput and potentially contribute to cross-contamination risk rather than reducing it. Handwashing stations and footwear sanitizing equipment that are ill-equipped to meet the throughput needs of your facility can result in reduced productivity when employees take longer than anticipated to wash their hands. On the other hand, poorly placed hygiene stations or lack of instructional signage may result in improper use or skipping the hygiene step altogether.

Considerations for selecting the proper handwashing stations

Depending on the requirements of your facility there are a number of different requirements that need to be met in order for your hygiene program to be successful.

  • Throughput. How much time will it take for each person to proceed through, and how many people are going to be using this handwashing station in a short period of time? It’s crucial to have a system in place that can adequately accommodate employee or guest volume to ensure productivity doesn’t decrease.
  • Necessary supplies and solutions. What supplies do you need for effective hand hygiene and are they easily acquired? It’s essential to always have adequate supplies to ensure staff and guests can perform an effective hand wash. During these unprecedented times having a hygiene partner with a reliable supply chain cannot be undervalued. Make sure you can support your throughput with the necessary supplies and solutions for hand hygiene. 
  • Mounting style. Where is this station going in your facility? There are a number of different mounting styles available for handwashing stations and this can greatly impact the flow of your hygiene zone. Make sure the station you select is built to fit into the design of your facility.
  • Footwear sanitization. Is simultaneous footwear sanitization a priority? Certain handwashing stations offer footwear sanitization options for complete CGMP compliance.
  • Cleaning and Maintenance. How easy or difficult is it to clean and sanitize your equipment, and how do you plan to maintain the hygienic integrity of your handwashing stations? In facilities held to the highest hygiene standards or places with extremely high throughput self-cleaning functionality may be a necessity. Some handwashing stations include self-cleaning functionality to automate this process and make ongoing maintenance much simpler.
  • Wash depth. How far up the forearm is needing to be washed? Certain facilities only need the hands washed, while others require up to the mid-forearm. Ensure the stations you select can accommodate your required wash depth.

Without carefully examining these considerations you may end up purchasing equipment that prevents you from achieving your hygiene goals.

Meritech offers a full line of automated handwashing stations that are clinically proven to remove more than 99.9% of harmful pathogens from hands in 12 seconds wasting zero water or solution. Remove the variability of human behavior from your hygiene process and effectively guarantee quality employee hygiene by incorporating CleanTech® Fully Automated Handwashing Stations in your facility. Click below to take our CleanTech® selection quiz for a product recommendation!

What automated hygiene equipment is right for me?

How CleanTech® Plus solves this challenge:

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Meritech doesn’t just sell handwashing stations and industrial footwear hygiene systems, we work with you to design a custom program based on the number of perfect handwashes you need in a year by learning how many hygiene zones you have, how many employees/guests will proceed through those zones, and how many times they need to wash per day. We then provide everything you need—all the equipment, solutions, service, full parts and labor warranty, and technical support, all for one low monthly price. We designed this program to take the guesswork out of handwashing so you can focus on what you do best: making safe, high-quality products for your customers.

Does CleanTech® Plus sound like the perfect solution to your hygiene program challenges? Learn more about the program and request a quote now at meritech.com/cleantech-plus.

Topics:CleanTech® Handwashing StationsHand Hygiene Resources