Are medical linen service benefits worth the leap of faith? Partnering with a medical linen service, especially if it’s your first, can be a nerve-wracking experience. “Will they deliver the quality my patients deserve?” “Are they going to be consistently on time with deliveries?” “What if their medical linens and uniforms aren’t as clean as they should be?”
There are so many things at stake. Everything from your inventory to patient experience can be affected. The impulse to just keep running an on-site laundry or sticking with a lackluster provider is understandable. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In the hands of the right service provider, there are many medical linen service benefits for your facility to gain. Here’s why a medical linen service offers far more than in-house laundry:
Medical Linen Service Benefits Part I: Cost Control
Owning your medical linens and doing your own laundry always seems like the more cost-efficient option. With full control of the operation comes full control of the expenses; but it’s not all soap, water, and electricity. You need to account for training, labor, management, repairs, replacement items, storage, and a host of other factors.
Cost is one of, if not the biggest, disadvantages of in-house laundry for healthcare facilities. It also happens to be one of the most overlooked. Your in-house facility leaves you in charge of the overhead cost of purchasing and maintaining your own equipment. This reality makes for some uncomfortable decisions.
For example, to keep costs down, you might decide to buy smaller washing equipment when the old one finally breaks. Though a reasonable idea at the time, a smaller volume of linens processed means additional wash cycles. Additional wash cycles mean more time, more energy, and more wear and tear on the new machine. Before you know it, you’re faced with the same, expensive decision again.
A healthcare laundry service protects you from this cost and others like it. Every month, you get a predictable bill. You do not have to worry about lowering your energy usage elsewhere or paying for additional employees during peak periods. You do not have to worry about the cost of maintaining your equipment either.
Medical Linen Service Benefits Part II: Quality Control
Quality materials are one of the most crucial aspects of a patient’s experience at your facility. Low-quality linens or cleaning procedures can turn otherwise great care into a mediocre, even dangerous experience.
Professional linen service providers have the expertise, the experience, and the facility advantage. The only way for in-house facilities to match is to hire laundry experts with similar training and capacity. This is costly and still doesn’t ensure consistent quality.
More than the industrial experience and technological advantage, it’s the undivided focus on linen and garment care that sets a professional facility apart. Service providers work entirely on linens and garments. Their entire operations and facility are dedicated only to the care of healthcare textiles. This undivided attention allows them to be stricter on quality control standards than your multitasking on-site facility.
Easing of Management Burdens
Added burden on your management can have negative effects on your organization. You are risking mediocre results and interruptions in your operations. As essential as linens are to your operations, they are not worth jeopardizing your facility’s other needs over.
This is where outsourcing is clearly your best option. Outsourcing your medical linens eases the burden on key areas in your management. That way, they can focus on the more important areas of healthcare service.
Take a Safe Leap of Faith Unitex!
The right medical linen service partner makes all the difference. The right medical linen service partner is Unitex! Contact us today at (914) 840-3200 to learn more about how our services can boost your facility’s efficiency. You can also send us your inquiries here!