The closing of Spring brings us just one season away from that most joyful of days: Global Handwashing Day.
Celebrated across the planet each October 15th by hundreds of millions of people, this grand 24-hour period serves as a reminder to school children, health care workers, foodservice workers, farmers, fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons to wash their hands with soap many times each day. This practice, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective way to prevent acute respiratory and diarrheal infections. These two infections kill people around the globe each and every day.
But, today sits in June…
So, what does Global Handwashing Day have to do with you and your facility right now? It turns out that the day and what it preaches has much to do with you each and every day. You, as a facility manager, are tasked with keeping your facilities safe and its occupants healthy on a daily basis and one of the greatest ways you can do this is by encouraging people to wash their hands.
Facility Manager Can Help
Facility Managers can help their occupants build hand washing habits by giving them the locations and tools they need to quickly and easily wash their hands. For most of us, this means ensuring there are an adequate number of sinks in the restrooms, plenty of antibacterial soap, and ways for the occupants to dry their freshly washed hands.
Getting enough sinks onsite is not normally something a facility manager needs to be concerned with since the number-of-sinks decision is ordinarily made during the design phase. However, properly maintaining the sinks and making sure the occupants always have access to antibacterial soap is something all facility managers have to deal with. This is why it is important for facility managers to have a robust work order management software program in place to ensure that these issues are dealt with on a recurring basis.
Also Read: Biofilms Are All Around Us
Paper or Air Dry
Deciding whether to offer either paper towels or air dryers to your facility’s occupants can be tricky since the latter are more high tech and, therefore, many believe, more effective. However, there have been numerous studies that have found that drying your hands with paper towels is the best option because it turns out that the hot air of the air dryers increases bacteria levels on people’s hands and in the bathrooms themselves. Moreover, drying your hands with an air dryer can take 400 percent longer than it does with the old-timey option.
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