Create a Piece of Home with Personalized Patient Laundry Services

March 03, 2015 3:39 AM Comment(s) By Gabriel Mandujano

When a loved one spends time in a long-term care facility, family members want to do their best to bring in pieces of home. Beyond providing familiar decorations and photos, ensuring a clean environment is on the top of the priority list. Typically, the options for laundry are limited to bulk services on-site or having a family member take the laundry home. Outsourcing these patient laundry services to the right company can offer benefits to both the patients, their families, and the facility as a whole. 

Personalization

In a standard medical laundry setting, patient personal laundry would be processed much the same way as the sheets and towels that belong to the facility. In short: throw all the laundry together in one giant bin and put items in industrial-sized machines. A patient, or a family member, would have little say in how items are washed and dried. But with a third-party company handling laundry at the right scale, clothes can be cleaned and folded just as they would be at home - in their own machine.  

Preventing Loss

Labeling garments with a patient's name is a common tip offered when entering a medical facility for long-term care. At best most medical laundry facilities will place individual items in a mesh bag, to be all washed together in large machines. However, an outside laundry company adept in processing clothes for individuals will treat a medical facility like a high-rise apartment complex, offering a bag to each patient. This bag can be labeled and contain only the patient's items, dramatically reducing loss. Now conversations between a patient's family and the facility's administrators can be centered around care and treatment plans, rather than a missing sock.  

Environmentally-Friendly Process

To wash clothes at home, a family spends time selecting detergents that leave their clothes soft and treat their skin with care. Industrial laundry practices are forced to use harsher detegents, often with chemicals. Now, there are green alternatives that are effective while staying hypo-allergenic.  

Right-Sized Equipment

Remember those big machines that are washing all the sheets, towels, and hospital gowns? The machines are built for large loads and the linens are constructed to withstand multiple washings - much more than your clothes are suited for. With the properly sized equipment, patient laundry will be washed in smaller loads, with gentler equipment, and will last longer. No need to go shopping to replace a favorite sweater due to wear and tear.  

Making the Most of Time Together

Some long-term care facilities or behavioral health clinics may offer smaller washers and dryers on-site for families to wash personal items. But why should this precius time together be spent folding clothes? Or without a patient laundry option on site, maybe a child or parent took laundry home to wash.   The right outsourcing laundry company gives time back to patients and families, while providing a clean, simple, trustworthy solution for patient clothes. 
Ready to increase patient and family satisfaction through clean laundry? An outsourced laundry and linen solution provides this benefit and many more. Wash Cycle Laundry provides outsourced and on premise laundry and linen solutions in Philadelphia, PA and Washington, DC
 
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