Fraser Health starting to use germ killing UVGI robots

Fraser Health has started to employ a new way to disinfect its medical equipment using light-emitting, germ-killing robots.

The region has 16 so-called ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) bots that can disinfect whole patient rooms in about 20 minutes.

The UVGI robots emit short pulses of ultraviolet radiation (UV) light, damaging the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) of harmful pathogens.

Now, as executive director of Infection Prevention and Control Ruth Dueckman explains, two new pod attachments have been added, allowing the bots to clean medical equipment.

“This technology provides an extra level of disinfection that you know that the human eye may not be able to see,” she explained.

“These pods are small little tents that [are] attached to the robot. And we can put medical equipment and wheelchairs and overhead trays and all that sort of stuff in there and give that extra level of disinfection that we couldn’t do before.”

She says while the new pods help medical teams, the people that benefit the most are the patients.

“‘Now we have that extra level of disinfection on pieces of equipment that patients come in contact with every day. And so we want to make sure that those invisible things that we can’t see are removed as much as possible.”

Dueckman explains that certain things weren’t getting the same amount of cleaning before the pods.

“We have often struggled with how to make sure that patients’ wheelchairs, and mobility aids and all of that equipment which have all these little nooks and crannies are cleaned properly. These pots were developed in response to that kind of need. And so we just felt that it was really important to add to our bundle of cleaning.”

She stressed that these pods are not meant to take over from existing work being done, but rather were introduced to complement that cleaning.

“This doesn’t replace the cleaning that our teams do and all of the hard work they do. And this is not in any way to say that they’re not doing great jobs cleaning, but  there are just some things the eyes can’t see.”

Fraser Health says in the past 21 months, its UVGI fleet has disinfected nearly 62,000 rooms.