Leading Supplier to Many Including the Healthcare Industry Where Cleaning is of the Utmost Importance [Interview][Transcript]
Guest: Murray McDonald
Presenter: Wayne Bucklar
Guest Bio: Murray McDonald has over 25 years experience in the distribution of healthcare cleaning equipment as Director of Duplex Cleaning Machines. Duplex is an exclusive distributor of the Duplex and Tecnovap brand of high temperature steam cleaning technology in the Asia-Pacific Region. Murray is author of the book ‘5 Steps to Chemical Free Cleaning in Healthcare’ and he also developed a first of its kind healthcare auditing app, AuditScan, which aims to simplify cleaning data collection and analysis.
Segment overview: In today’s Health Supplier Segment, Murray McDonald joins to discuss their wide range of quality products that Duplex Cleaning Machines has to offer. The company boasts a range of over thirty stocked machines including floor scrubbers, battery powered floor scrubbers, sweepers, steam cleaners, steam vacuums, high filtration vacuums and even escalator cleaners. With over twenty years of operation Duplex Cleaning Machines products have solved cleaning issues and improved cleaning standards in thousands of commercial facilities.
Transcription
Health Professional Radio
Wayne Bucklar: You’re listening to Health Professional Radio with Wayne Bucklar. Today my guest is Murray McDonald. Murray is the director with Duplex Cleaning Machines Proprietary Limited. Welcome to Health Professional Radio, Murray.
Murray Mcdonald: Thank you very much Wayne.
W: Now Murray tell us to start with a little bit about Duplex Cleaning Machines and what product it is and what geographic foot print you work in.
M: We provide chemical free cleaning solutions to the healthcare industry. We focus on high temperature steam technology, so that technology has been around for many years. So for 25 years we worked in sustainable healthcare cleaning disinfecting solutions. In recent times some of our activities have been from providing boarding steam systems to cleaning to advice and information on how to get better cleaning methods and better cleaning systems into healthcare environments with things like the product that we have is “auditing” a healthcare clean auditing application called “AuditScan.” So those operations go between Australia, New Zealand and into Asia Pacific, the Southeast Asia market.
W: Okay. So you’ve got a much wider service footprint than I imagine. I was thinking it was only Melbourne but it’s in fact Australia wide and Asia pacific.
M: Yeah. So we’re in every capital city, we have operations so we have local people or local staff in every capital city. But we do a lot of work out into country, regional areas around Australia and New Zealand so that’s probably Australia is one of our major markets. We’ve got our distributors in South East Asia in Singapore, in Malaysia, Hong Kong and China, Japan so we travel widely around the area.
W: Okay. Now just paint a picture for me of what this process looks like. How does this high temperature steam cleaning work in practice?
M: Well the practice is very simple I suppose really we go across and carry out cleaning and disinfecting on high touch surfaces because science has done that the places where people are touching whether staff, patients are the two critical ones, but also visitors coming in, that’s where the contaminations are occurring or the bed of bugs. So whether it’s lights switch or a door knob or a tray table or some drawers, they are critical surfaces rather than the actual full surface so our high temperature steam just sprays out lightly over these surfaces and with a very simple glance and the person has a microfiber glove or cloth and I can go across the heat, disinfects the surface, a little bit of moisture is washing and cleaning the surface at the same time and beautifully removing any contaminants that are on that surface without needing to use any other chemical so it’s a very quick logical practice that gets carried out.
W: I see. Now Murray, most of our audience working in acute care facility, are clinicians in hospitals. What is that you’d like them to know about your product?
M: Well everyone I suppose is used to chemical in carrying out so if a carer or a clinician whose gone through the mode of a patient, a patient mode of change over in there, when he’s so used to using chemicals in a very manual process for cleaning.
W: Uh huh.
M: So really these days the world has moved one. We don’t necessarily need to use that all the time. We’re using a 3000 year old mop and buckets in an operating theater these days. I’m sure there are better practices than using that these days Wayne. So yeah changing the way we look at things and changing the way that we do that and certainly the steam technology and microfiber can really move away from the chemicals, the old outdated cleaning tools like the mop and bucket, recycling contaminated water and now pushing to a cleaner more disinfectant and sterilized way.
W: Now of course in the health industry, 3000 years is not a long time. This is not an industry renowned for adopting things really quickly. I understand you’ve written a book “5 Steps to Chemical Free Cleaning in Health Care” to try and drive home this, so tell us about the publication.
M: Yes. The book we wrote that last year. And we printed that, so that’s available it’s really a step by step guide and it’s the “5 Steps to Chemical Free Cleaning” it’s a step by step guide to best practice. So I was looking at research over the last decade, because previously there hasn’t been a lot of research carried out on cleaning, yet with all the superbugs that are now increasing, increasingly occurring and outbreaks, a lot of research has been invested throughout the world over the last decade or so into these cleaning and infection control. So that knowledge really sits off and within the infection control group and doesn’t really get passed down to the cleaning staff or clinicians that are out onto the ward area. So we thought we write a book and put that content into print and start to educate people. So we go through a process of best practice, looking at identification and pre-planning, how are they going to introduce a better cleaning system. We looked at assessment, auditing, how can you audit your current cleaning system, how do you know where to start, on what is working and what is failing within your current cleaning disinfecting process? And then we go into the planning – developing goals, managing object from staff ward this is changed, we’re dealing with humans, habits and how do we move people from one system to a better system and we’re going to formulizing a program so it makes it easy, and the implementation, getting into touch point cleaning and then training and consistent work flows, so people are doing a better more logical job and not missing key touch points in the healthcare facility. And then we go into the evaluation – how to then audit against their earlier assessment – so bench marking, getting into the bench mark, that’s what the book goes into so best practice Wayne.
W: It is one of those fundamental things in the healthcare, isn’t it? And infection control, it’s one of the areas that it’s nice to see some research being applied to and some solutions with your Duplex Cleaning Machines being able to actually make that an easier process than it might otherwise be. You’re listening to Health Professional Radio with Wayne Bucklar and my guest today is Murray McDonald the director of Duplex Cleaning Machines. Murray one of my favorite questions to ask people is about misconceptions. If there’s a misconception about chemical free cleaning that drives you nuts and keeps you awake at night, what would that be?
M: There’s probably a couple of things there. People think it will cost more, people don’t like to change in their current process where they’re very happy, we mentioned before about habits and how big a step is to change. And always people think there’s goanna be a cost related to it but these days cost of things and they look at the label or people may not look at the label content that gets time to take do it half an hour with their existing systems and then moving to a chemical free cleaning system. But there’s a lot of studies and research work that has gone into that component, independent studies that verifies that you can get better outcomes without breaks, less chemical usage and using less chemicals. So there’s actually dollar saving, just those alone. Then so becomes cost neutral very much so the process that there is many savings that can be gained from water savings and these days we don’t look at the environmental impact of some of the processes that we are doing, so there’s also savings on the environmental side of things.
W: Murray I think it’s a fascinating topic that you brought up. How can people get in touch with you?
M: Very simple. They can go onto our website duplexcleaning.com.au, my contact there with it. They can telephone us and talk and communicate on 1-800-622-770.
W: Now every time I do one of these interviews Murray and I give a phone number, I always get complaints that people didn’t have a pen in hand. So fair warning get your pens ready, give us that number again Murray.
M: It’s 1-800-622-770.
W: Murray it’s been a pleasure having you on Health Professional Radio this morning. We’ll do a transcript of this interview for anyone who’s missed it and a SoundCloud archive that will be available on our website at www.hpr.fm. My name is Wayne Bucklar, you’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio.