Keeping Pests Out Of Your Healthcare Facility
Your healthcare facility is so much more than just a business - it’s a refuge; a clean, safe space where your patients and clients can find the help they need for the problems they’re facing. Whether you’re operating a hospital, running a small clinic, or even upkeeping a waiting area, your healthcare space should be a welcoming area - and pest control is key to keeping it that way.
A pest invasion can ruin a patient or client’s healthcare experience. Between scaring visitors, spreading disease, and disrupting operations, pests can pose a serious problem for healthcare providers of all sizes. Here’s a look at how to keep pests away from your facility - and your patients.
Cockroaches
Like most heavily-trafficked buildings, cockroaches are all-too-common among healthcare facilities. The presence of food, water, and secluded hiding spaces around a facility make for perfect breeding grounds for cockroaches, which can establish a colony relatively undisturbed that can be extremely hard to fully eradicate.
Because cockroaches are known to harbor and spread disease and filth to almost everything they touch, it’s imperative that you eliminate cockroach infestations as soon as they pop up, and to prevent them from returning (or from ever establishing a presence in the first place).
Keeping your facility clean of all food and standing water can remove the temptation for cockroaches to establish a presence in your facility, and an experienced pest management professional can help remove any cockroaches that might have found their way in. Using the right combination of preventative and responsive measures, you can keep your healthcare facility free from cockroaches well into the future.
Bed Bugs
Most healthcare facilities know that once an infectious bacteria or virus enters a facility, removing it - and preventing its spread to other patients - can be a hugely difficult task. Bed bugs can often pose a very similar situation: one patient or visitor brings them in, and it doesn’t take long before they’ve spread to others.
A bed bug infestation can pose huge problems for healthcare facilities, especially hospitals. Linens, bedding, clothing, carpeting, and even fabric window coverings can all harbor bed bugs, and removal can be a hugely complicated and difficult procedure. Often, removal requires specialized vacuums with HEPA-rated filters, and possibly even treatments involving heat, chemicals, or both.
Like a finely-trained surgeon, an experienced pest professional can completely and cleanly remove all bed bugs in your facility, and recommend strategies to keep bed bugs from your facility in the future.
Ants
Health care facilities, especially those offering long-term care where patients or visitors might spend multiple days in the same space, can often fight with ant problems. Ants are attracted to facilities based on a variety of factors, including ease-of-access from the outside, availability of food and water, and security of spaces to hide and establish nests.
If your healthcare facility is located in a rural area surrounded by trees or open land, ants might seek out openings or cracks in your foundation, open doors, or windows as a way to get in. A pest management professional can help you identify those entry points and seal them off before ants make their way in, and can even help eliminate ant colonies in your space with modern control methods like traps and bait.
Rodents
Hospitals and healthcare facilities across the world, and especially in urban or densely-populated areas, deal with rodent issues that would frighten many patients away at the first sign of a mouse or rat. Because rodents are attracted to many of the same factors as other pests - food, water, and undisturbed hiding spaces to raise a nest - keeping rodents away from your facility can be especially tricky.
The best way to keep rodents away is to prevent them from ever finding their way inside in the first place. Because spaces like ductwork, plumbing lines, and basements can offer easy access inside, a pest management specialist can help identify and seal off entrances to keep rodents away and keep your facility pest-free.
Mold & Surface Sanitation
Safe healthcare is clean healthcare, and unclean spaces breed disease and infection. That’s why it’s imperative for healthcare facilities to keep all surfaces and patient areas sanitized and mold-free - and that can be a difficult task, especially for large and heavily-trafficked spaces.
Staying compliant with sanitation standards means more than just keeping the surface-level clean; compliance requires thorough, verifiable cleanliness standards that prevent sickness from spreading. A mold control professional can help you develop and maintain cleanliness strategies that both keep your patients from contracting disease and keep your facility compliant with current standards.
Don’t Let Your Facility Fall Victim To Pests
Once a pest invasion makes its way into your healthcare facility, the consequences can be dire and long-lasting. In order to better protect your patients, your staff, and your reputation, it’s critical that you keep your facility pest-free and clean at any given moment.
With the help of an experienced pest control professional, you can make sure pests stay far away from your facility - and your patients - well into the future. If you’re a healthcare facility owner struggling to effectively manage pests or would like your current program reviewed, request a free consultation today by our experienced organic professionals at JP Pest Services. We have years of experience creating and implementing programs for healthcare facilities.
