The Healthcare Laundry Accreditation Council (HLAC) is reporting widespread name recognition for the organization and great interest in its new HLAC Laundry Process Monitoring 

ToolKitä (PMTK) from visitors to its booths at both The Clean Show - CLEAN 2019, and APIC 2019 - Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. APIC 2019 was held June 12-14 in Philadelphia, PA, and CLEAN 2019 was held June 20-23 in New Orleans, LA. 

"The show was very well attended," said Bradley J. Bushman of the APIC conference. Bushman is board president of HLAC. HLAC is a nonprofit organization that inspects and accredits laundries processing textiles for hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities.

"HLAC name recognition was excellent with many attendees distinguishing the superior nature of our accreditation program vs. other available programs," he said. "Laundry control and quality textiles were universally important to the visitors to our booth. The PMTK was of great interest and there was almost unanimous support for its need."

Utilizing proprietary extraction techniques, HLAC's new PMTKvalidates the effectiveness of a laundry's processes by measuring the number of microorganisms found in a laundry on hard surfaces, in the air, on linen, in the water and on employee hands.

Gregory Gicewicz, who represented the nonprofit at CLEAN, echoed Bushman's APIC comments, and he noted the many praises given HLAC's accreditation process and standards.  "Clearly, HLAC accreditation is making a difference for many in the industry," Gicewicz said. "And visitors to our booth, HLAC-accredited and non-accredited alike, realized the value of a resource like PMTK to maintain and safeguard their standards in the name of hygiene and infection prevention." Gicewicz heads the committee that developed the toolkit on behalf of HLAC.

On hand at HLAC's CLEAN 2019 booth were reprints of a recent article in Laundry Ledger that catalogs the experiences and observations of early adopters of PMTK, as well as a video demonstration of how to use the toolkit.

HLAC views PMTK as a logical outgrowth of its professional expertise and a response to operators who want to continually know how well their processes are performing and whether standards are on target as originally intended.

Online information about PMTK is available at its website, www.pmtknet.org.