Have you ever wondered how busy hotels or thriving hospitals manage to supply freshly-washed linen to every new occupant, at any time of the day or night? Well, I have often wondered at the gigantic scale of laundry operations that enables the housekeeping departments of both these service-oriented facilities to function on well-oiled wheels.
Most facilities operate in-house laundries. The positive aspect of having an in-house laundry is that quality control problems can be effectively controlled and late deliveries can be eliminated. However, the downside is that they are expensive to operate and take up a lot of space. It has been noticed of late, that proprietors of hotels and hospitals are beginning to opt for off-site laundries or outsource the business to commercial laundries in a bid to maximize space and minimize costs.
As hotels and hospitals seek to utilize the space left behind by on-site laundries to generate additional revenue,off-site laundries are beginning to gain in importance. Hence, the successes of centralized laundries which are able to meet the requirements of a group of hotels and hospitals at significantly lower costs.
Reiterating this fact is John Nazareth, zone manager of Abu Dhabi National Hotels Compass Middle East LLC, the company which operates the ADNH Central Laundry in Abu Dhabi. Established a year ago, the ADNH Central Laundry runs its operations for the hotels under the ADNH group in Abu Dhabi and the hospitals under the SEHA banner.“Apart from this, the central laundry has signed a tenyear contract with the Ministry of Health, Abu Dhabi, to provide laundry services to hospitals under its purview, namely, Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, Mafraq Hospital and Al Rahaba Hospital.Citing the contract with the Ministry of Health, Abu Dhabi, as a case in point, Nazareth drives home the cost-effectiveness aspect of a central laundry.
“Earlier the hospital laundry was being processed in-house in an arrangement wherein the workforce was supplied by a contractor and the maintenance and the utilities were being managed by the Ministry. Once they entered into a 10-year agreement with the ADNH Central Laundry,the hospitals were able to commercially exploit the space hitherto occupied by on-site laundries. Now, the Ministry just has to pay one price rather than separately bear the maintenance, detergents, manpower and utilities expenses.”However, the overpowering factor that works in favour of the ADNH Central Laundry is the quality of service it provides, which stringently adheres to the standards laid down by the Abu Dhabi Health Authority as well as the standards laid down by the management of the individual hospitals and hotels.
Adhering to stringent requirements
“When the laundry was being processed in-house in the three hospitals, their system was quite different from our’s, whereas, we maintain an efficient process flow between the three hospitals, under a regular pickup and dispatch schedule. 
Every piece of laundry is documented in terms of kilograms as well as description by piece. We know exactly what comes in at any given time or any particular day,”said Nazareth. In addition, a record of “weight loss of soiled laundry against clean” is also maintained.Nazareth organizes a continuous quality check (CQI)on the laundry to meet the required standard, where even a single hair on washed linen is not accepted.However, this is not without its difficulties, he maintained, as fine slivers of the patients’ hair can get embedded in woolen blankets.The washed laundry undergoes a third party evaluation from time to time for parameters such as ‘whiteness of the sheets’ and bacterial contamination and overall quality.
Processing infected linen
Once inside the laundry, we were able to see firsthand the scale of operations in a centralized laundry.The ADNH Central Laundry was designed from the start to handle the laundry of hospitals and carry out the “challenging task of processing infected linen”
whereby a ‘Barrier Wash’ system is incorporatedensuring that dirty linen does not come in contact with clean linen at any time.
The first and foremost requirement was to see that the laundry has a designated area to segregate infected linen. Since all hospital linen is qualified as infected linen, the HVAC system in the segregation area, where the linen is segregated into the heavily-soiled and medium-soiled categories, is different from the HVAC system of the rest of the laundry.
“We have different air duct systems for the segregation area and the rest of the laundry so that in case of air contamination by infected linen, the airborne bacteria and viruses do not get carried over to other areas, thus ensuring that clean linen remains uncontaminated’’asserts Nazareth.
The protocol for treating highly-infected linen coming from the infectious wards starts with the hospital staff bagging it and tagging it separately. This load is processed in a special washer-extractor placed in a dedicated room, meant only for highly-infected linen.
The effluence from this machine, i.e. the wash water, is also treated prior to being released in the laundry drainage system, so as not to contaminate the city’smain sewage line. Secondly, the five giant Milnor washer extractors that line the floor use the ‘barrier wash technology’ to ensure that the clean linen never comes in contact with dirty linen as the loading unit is completely different from the unloading unit.
The success of any laundry is to see that linen which is dispatched to the hospitals is clean and free of any contaminants whatsoever. “Foreign objects are a regular occurrence in the linen bags” said Nazareth,citing objects such as, “pens, needles, tape and other medical equipment is found in the soiled linen.
Maintaining health and safety protocols
A strict QHSE protocol is maintained in the laundry supervised by HSE officer Saji Markose. It is mandatory for the staff working in the entire laundry to wear
‘personal protective units’ like face masks at all times.In the segregation area, it is a must to wear gloves as well and sure enough, during our entire visit at the
laundry, we did not see a single staff member remove his face mask or gloves.
A ‘tool box training’ is conducted every shift wherein the staff is made aware of the lurking danger of foreign objects which can not only cause harm to the
workers but also tear the linen and cause machinery
to malfunction.
“At no time is the staff allowed to become complacent orover confident,
factors that can lead to negligence, hence the daily ‘tool box’ training,” explained Markose.Furthermore, there is continuous risk assessment at every stage, for e.g. to rule out bodily damage to the staff due to un-ergonomic weight lifting. “No worker is allowed to lift a linen bag weighing more than 30 kilograms,” said Saji.
As we watched, the staff inspected the incoming linen for foreign objects and stains and deftly segregated the pile into heavily-soiled, medium-soiled and lightlysoiled categories, which would require wash cycles 1,2 and 3 respectively. Wash cycle number 4 is set for uniforms and number 5 for coloured clothes. For each cycle, the temperature at which the water is heated varies, ranging from 60 to 80 degrees centigrade. The linen is also segregated according to the type, i.e. towels, sheets, blankets, uniforms, personal clothes tobe washed in their own lots.
All the linen goes through a spot check for stains and for tapes.” It is not easy to spot white tape on a white sheet; however, we are very careful at this stage. In case a tape is missed at this stage, it is all the more difficult to spot it later on, for after the wash, the sheet gets dried, pressed and comes out folded in the Flat Work Iron system,” explained Nazareth. The challenge in processing hotel linen stems from the high standards demanded by hotel guests and the tourism authority. Even the slightest stain or wrinkle is not accepted.
Prior to being loaded into the washers-extractors, the stains are treated with stain removers, grease busters,organic solvents etc depending on the type of stain
and its corresponding removing agent. Blood stains are considered to be non-greasy stains and treated accordingly, first scrubbed with plain water and then
treated with chemicals like Quick Go.
Operations manager M.K. Rai explained that the spotting of stains and their subsequent removal was a pre-requisite to a clean output. “A little care at this
stage eliminates the need for a rewash, which proves to be expensive and time consuming.” The laundry has been able to minimize its rewashing from 8 percent to 01 percent in a year’s time, which speaks well for the team.The Milnor washer-extractors, each costing over halfa million dirhams, run at 575 revolutions per minute (rpm) in final extraction wash cycles: number 1 which takes about one hour and 15 minutes; number 2 taking an hour and number 3 taking about 50 minutes.
Conserving water and energy
The different types of segregated linen, i.e. sheets,towels, blankets, uniforms, personal clothing, are collected and when they reach an optimum of 190
kilograms, the machines are closed for the wash to begin.”We try to conserve water and electricity by loading the machines optimally so as to reduce the
number of wash cycles,” said Rai
The machines can take an optimum load of 204 kilograms in one operation. At any given time, the laundry is capable of processing 900 kilograms of linen in one operation. Delicate clothes are processed separately in a smaller machine. The laundry switches off light bulbs in areas that are not in use to conserve energy.
All the machines are connected to an automatic chemical dosing system set up by Arpal Gulf, to ensure that just the right amount of detergent and chemicals is used and to ensure minimum exposure of the staff to chemicals. The machines take in the water and chemicals according to the pre-assigned wash cycle which is again determined by parameters such as the type of soiling.
A peek inside the dosing room showed us the autodosing system, containing rows of containers of the required chemicals, i.e. Brilliant Liquid Prodet Plus (detergent) and Brilliant Booster (to boost cleaning power), Brilliant Destainer, Brilliant Fabfresh, Brilliant Greasebuster and Brilliant Sour, from where controlled amounts of the chemicals are fed into the laundry machines. When the chemicals in the containers reach below a certain level, a alarm goes on and a red light is lit,which means a refilling is due. All the chemicals are environmentfriendly and biodegradable.
However, the auto dosing unit will dispense the chemicals according to the wash cycle and not according to the load inside the machines. Hence, the same amount of chemicals is dispensed to the machines, irrespective of whether the load in the laundry machine is 50 kilograms or 200 kilograms.
Even though the ADNH Central laundry has a water recycling facility, the water is not currently being recycled, as the laundry processes both hotel and hospital linen alike. However, in the near future, two other machines are expected to arrive which will be used only for processing hotel laundry, making it feasible to
recycle the wash water as well.
Drying and folding
We moved to the washing and drying area where the freshlywashed load like towels and blankets are removed from the washer-extractors and put into the dryers where they are dried at 170-200 degrees centigrade. Dry towels are passed through a towel folder which is programmed to fold towels according to different folding styles. Blankets are folded by hand as they cannot be put in the Flat Work Ironer on account of Dry towels are passed through a towel folder which is programmed to fold towels according to different folding styles. Blankets are folded by hand as they cannot be put in the Flat Work Ironer on account of their thickness. “Blankets also have to go through a quality check to see that there are no stains, tape and hair on them, which happens simultaneously while they are being folded,” said Rai Bed linen and flat sheets are not sent to the dryers but to the Flat Work Ironer (FWI), which has the autofeeder, the ironer and folder units respectively. The Flat Work Ironer dries, irons and folds the sheets in one pass. Uniforms are ironed using the steam press which is also used for delicate and coloured clothes. White clothes are ironed using the hot-head press in order to give uniforms an original finishing.
Provision has been made to do the laundry of clients such as fitness and health
clubs through the presence of a ‘tunnel finisher’ wherein a steam injection unit and a hot air blower smoothens wrinkles and speeds up the process.
The ironed linen is then sent to packing machines, where it is packed and counted. The Abu Dhabi Central Laundry maintains a team of professional tailors to mend rips and tears in the linenand other clothing.
The packed laundry is then dispatched to its destination, be it hotel or hospital, in commercial vehicles that are modified so that soiled laundry does not come in contact with the clean. The vehicles are also fitted with ramps that can be lowered to facilitate loading and unloading of trolleys in places where there are no loading bays. The maximum holding time for laundry is 24 hours. Hospital laundry is collected in the morning and delivered by afternoon.
As of now, about 50 percent of the facility is being used and the management’s efforts so far have been to run the operations in a streamlined, efficient manner, where attention is paid to the smallest detail.
At a distance of every few feet, each station has a sanitizer to ensure clean hands, the workers are polite and neatly dressed, presence of a maintenance team, round-the-clock security, employee vaccinations, the premises are spic and span, the place is orderly, shower rooms are in place in fact, everything conceivable is in place. Everything, except mobile phones in the hands of laundry staff during work hours, for as Nazareth says, “the attention to quality cannot be compromised for even a second.”
