CHICAGO — Richard Warren, manager of the Conway, Ark., facility of Linen King, sees that one of the biggest “headaches” for textile rental companies is that, many times, when a customer goes on a rental program, they “lose all sense of responsibility.”
“If employees use napkins or pillowcases to polish their shoes, it’s OK. If some item appears to be overly soiled, it’s OK to discard it,” he says. “In both cases, that’s the wrong assumption.”
HEALTHCARE ISSUES, SOLUTIONS
“We spend a great deal of time trying to educate our customers to maximize the service that we’re providing,” says Seth Gershman, director of marketing and communications for Unitex Textile Rental Services in New York. “We’re really trying to add value to the service since a lot of customers have to pay additional fees when it’s not coming back to us.”
Misuse of rented textiles and linens in a healthcare setting is a major issue, but he sees that the problem goes deeper.
Gershman says that until textile misuse becomes a big enough issue for healthcare management and administration to start seeing the dollar figures associated with the loss, his grassroots initiatives to educate the customer has minimal effect.
“We try, and we do a lot of things to try to talk to the user,” he says. “We talk to the nurses, the CNAs, the staff that’s really the day-to-day user. However, until there’s real pressure put on them by management, it’s really tough for us to make any inroads.”
One thing that Unitex and most textile rental companies do, according to Gershman, is monitor the usage closely so that the company knows exactly what it’s sending and what it’s getting back.
“We have a pretty good gauge on who’s being responsible and who is not being responsible,” he says. “When administration starts getting bills in the six figures for lost linen, then they start really taking notice, and we’ve been able to help with the education process.”
Gershman finds that a lot of customers don’t have any meaningful internal education or training on linen.
“We were just at a nursing home and talking to staff about the use of the linen,” he says. “We supply them with bath blankets. The purpose of those is to substitute for three regular towels when a patient’s being bathed.
“Not a single person on the staff knew that that’s what it was for. They were using them as a blanket for the bed. Instead of using a regular thermal blanket, they were using a bath blanket. We went in and explained to staff that the product they’re using, they’re misusing.”
“They’re not making Halloween costumes out of the sheets,” Gershman continues, “but they’re using the linens to clean up spills, clean the floor. If there are leaks, they’ll put our linens on the pipes to hold water.”
Another common misuse he sees is the linen on the windowsill to help seal the window better.
Then there are the door jambs.
“They’re really good for door jambs. Take some linen, take a nice towel and stick it in there. That always works pretty well,” Gershman says with a dry chuckle.
Education is vital because often the end-users have a complete lack of understanding that the textile is rented, according to Gershman. The product is owned by a textile rental company, and the users don’t understand that the cost to replace the item is significantly more than it is to rent the item.
“To give a ballpark figure, it costs about $4.50 to replace a sheet but 50 cents to rent a sheet. If you’re getting thousands of sheets a day in your order, if a percentage of that isn’t coming back to us, you can imagine the kind of numbers you’re dealing with,” Gershman says.
Sometimes, the misuse will create a stain that can’t be removed from the linen.
“The purpose of the linen is for patient care, so if you’re using it for anything else, then you’re wasting our service,” he says. “We’re not servicing linen for the maintenance crew at the hospital, but they tend to get their hands on our product quite a lot and use it for cleaning instruments, covering instruments, cleaning spills, using it as a coating on a bench where they’re doing some sort of work. It doesn’t necessarily permanently ruin the item, but that’s not what it’s for.”
“The rental company must be as aggressive when establishing boundaries, in these cases, as the customer is at establishing their boundaries,” Warren says. “When there are clearly defined communications, there is a better chance of a positive relationship.”
Gershman says that his most effective educational efforts take place face-to-face with a customer. One useful method, that he notes other companies do as well, is setting up “linen awareness days.”
Gershman says his company picks a date and sets up a table by a high-traffic area, by an elevator bank or in the cafeteria. On the table are textile marketing materials that are put together about the service his company offers and some of the issues that it has seen at that particular location.
“We create a board that we pin up lots of slides on that have usage graphs on them, along with different pieces of literature on what the hospital might be spending, how many pounds of linen we’ve been sending them, what the average would be compared to what they’re using,” he says. “We’ll try to give the staff an idea of how they stack up.”
Gershman adds that linen awareness days often work better with follow-up efforts to keep presenting the same messages. It’s not a one-time, get information to the staff and kind of cross your fingers and hope that it works.
“I like to follow up with what I call in-services,” he says. “We’ll go in by unit, get the staff together, whoever handles the linen, and have a 5- to 10-minute presentation, a Q-and-A. We give them information, but they also give us a lot of good information to help find where some of the problems are occurring. You may find out that you’re not even servicing the right product to the unit. We’ve done them very aggressively at hospital systems that have had long-term issues, and we’ve really had to work hard to get the messages out.”
Another method Gershman uses is to help hospitals set up linen committees. He says they try to get representation from several different units and departments. The committees meet quarterly (if possible) and discuss all of the linen issues.
“At several big systems, I work directly with the marketing departments to do some co-branding of pieces where we’ll have our message and the hospital logo and messages on the same pieces,” he says. “The hospital will then circulate it internally, or use the local intranet to circulate slides on what we’re working on.”
Finally, Gershman notes that his company has full-service teams that are in the hospitals, talking with them about any type of service issue besides usage. Part of that would be discussing if they’re having issues with loss.
“Again, for these initiatives, we typically need to have upper-management endorsement and support in order for this to really stick,” he says. “Like I said earlier, unless we have really good buy-in from the people signing the checks, the message will go in one ear, it may stay in the ear for a few days, but eventually it’s going to come out and you’re back at square one.”
Check back Tuesday for the conclusion, which will look at food service linen misuse.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].