(514q) Clinical Study of Long-Term Antimicrobial Coating on Hard Environmental Surface in Public Hospital

Multi-drug Resistant Organisms (MDROs) are microorganisms which usually resist to more than one class of antibiotics. There are plenty of guidelines implementing, including hand hygiene guidelines, MDRO patient treatment policy. However, the heavy routine workload makes it hard to adhere to these guidelines The smart antimicrobial coating is designed to provide a sustainable release of antimicrobial agent to provide a long term protection to surface. The antimicrobial coating is designed to use a water in oil in water emulsion structure to encapsulate chlorine dioxide such that the biocide can be released slowly to the environment

The coating was applied to four orthopedic wards in a local hospital in Hong Kong. Two wards acted as the control group and two wards acted as the treatment group. The two groups were swapped after 6 months of experiment. For the treatment group, bed-rail, chest table and locker were coated by wiping with the coating in addition to the daily cleaning with bleach (1000 ppm). For the control group, bleach (1000 ppm) was used to clean the surface daily. Environmental swabs (N= 2249) were taken from the patient immediate environment twice a month. Our study showed that there was an overall 0.369 log10 reduction of biological contamination on the surface involved in this study compared to the normal cleaning regime.

The result has indicated the feasibility of an improved cleaning regime. The add-on effect of antimicrobial activity towards existing furniture is a workable solution for reducing nosocomial infection.