Comparison of disinfection using pre-soaked wipes and automatic UV-C radiation without prior cleaning

B Knobling, A Ulatowski, G Franke, CE Belmar Campos, H Büttner, EM Klupp, PM Maurer, FHH Brill, JK Knobloch

Poster P400 | ICPIC 2023 - 7th International Conference on Prevention & Infection Control (ICPIC), Geneva, 12-15 September 2023

Background: The use of automatic UV-C disinfection devices has increased in recent years to improve cleaning performance in hospitals. Since laboratory tests allow no direct conclusions about effectiveness in a hospital, we established a field test for efficacy assessment of UV-C in comparison to manual disinfection under realistic conditions.

Methods: Frequent sampling of surfaces with close contact to high risk patients were taken before and after disinfection using swab technique to obtain representative data samples for disinfected and non-disinfected surfaces. Subsequently, the log reduction values (LRV) and the proportion of disinfection success were evaluated for UV-C radiation and full compliant manual disinfection using alcohol based wipes.

Results: Mean contamination was reduced from 23.3 to 1.98 cfu/cm² (LRV 0.9) and 29.7 to 0.26 cfu/cm² (LRV 1.2) for UV-C and manual disinfection, respectively. UV-C disinfection achieved 75.5 % successful disinfected surfaces, whereas manual disinfection showed 97.2 %.

Conclusions: Full compliant manual disinfection showed slightly greater LRV and disinfection success than automatic UV-C disinfection. In comparison to manual disinfection success in reality, operator-independent UV-C disinfection still enables the potential to improve disinfection performance in addition to manual disinfection.