Courtesy WTSP.com

Tampa, Florida – On the first floor of UCH’s Pepin Hospital, a bright blue light illuminated an otherwise dark hallway.

Through the glass of a patient room, UCH’s newest weapon in its battle against bacteria and germs churned out the blue light and an invisible wave length that seems more science fiction than cleaning agent.

“We treat the entire room, all the exposed surfaces with a very high intensity electromagnetic field that disrupts the genetic material in a pathogen,” explained Mark Statham, with the machine’s creator, Infection Prevention Technologies.

UCH’s director of Infection Control, Jacqueline Whitaker says she came across the machine in her search for a more effective way to prevent hospital infections and is confident she’s found it in IPT’s portable room sterilization machine. Over the summer, UCH ran tests of the machine on 30 patient rooms.

Staff first cleaned the rooms using traditional cleaning methods with chemicals and then took cultures of the room. Then, they placed the sterilization machine, which resembles an over-sized bug zapper, and let it run for ten minutes.The cultures of the room after it was cleaned with chemicals showed the growth of bacteria colonies.

It was a different story after the room was treated with the machine.

“It effectively eliminated any organism that can potentially cause disease in the next patient that wold go in that room,” said Whitaker. The machine will play an important role in the hospital’s efforts to fight hospital infections. “We’re always looking to see how we can effectively kill these organisms if a patient brings them into the hospital, so we don’t transmit them to the next patient,” said Whitaker.

Whitaker says UCH’s hospital infection rate is less than 1%. “Actually it averages about 0.4% and that’s an excellent rate for our hospital, but we want it to be zero,” she said.

The machine didn’t come cheap, with a price tag of about $100,000, but Whitaker says the costs outweighs the potential costs if someone gets sick. “That’s a significant amount of money, but each infection, whether it’s a blood stream infection of a surgical site infection can cost you anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000,” said Whitaker.

Whitaker says they plan to use the machine in patient rooms when they are discharged and in the surgical rooms in addition to regular cleaning disinfection.

© WTSP.com