Planning, designing and maintaining Hospital laundry to reduce carbon foot prints and to make it energy efficient and cost competitive.

Dr.M.Yamuna Rani; Dr. G.Sravana Kumar; Dr.R.K.Chaturvedi; Dr J.N Rao

Volume : VI, Issue : V, May - 2017

Planning, designing and maintaining Hospital laundry to reduce carbon foot prints and to make it energy efficient and cost competitive.

Dr. M. Yamuna Rani, Dr. G. Sravana Kumar, Dr. R. K. Chaturvedi, Dr J. N Rao

Abstract :

Linen and Laundry services are considered to be one of the most important supportive services in a hospital. No hospital can pursue its activity of patient care even for a moment without the aid of proper linen service.1 Purpose of the study was to get an informative and detailed picture of the resource utilization, planning and designing of the Laundry in a cost effective manner. In conventional Planning and Designing of laundry the size and area is related to number of beds which doesn�t seem to be logical as the main determining factors is the load of linen and clothes to be washed like number of Operation theatres, ICU beds and day care beds where linen may have to be changed more than once thus the area requirement for 100 bed psychiatric centre and cardiac centre would be drastically different. According to Dr. J .R. Mc Gibony, area requirement for a laundry in teaching hospital should be 5800 sq.ft.2According to a survey of Delhi hospitals in 1978 is 10 sq.ft./bed or 10 sq.ft./5 lbs of linen.3 Conventionally steam based drying and calend� system was traditionally considered more economical which was not found to be true. We conducted a study of laundry services in an 1800 bedded tertiary care teaching hospital and found that in a steam driven laundry system total energy expense contributed to 58% of total cost which includes diesel cost (51%) and electricity (8%). After shifting to electricity driven laundry system, the energy cost decreased to 24% of the total cost, giving a savings of 35%. This paper has tried to give a comprehensive approach to planning and designing consideration and economical operations of laundry system of hospital.