Flushing compliance enhanced at St George's.

The estates team at St George's Hospital in south London say the deployment of a web-based software system which verifies that 'responsible' staff across the site have regularly flushed low-use water outlets to maintain flow, and thus prevent potentially dangerous waterborne bacteria building up in pipework, has 'very substantially' increased compliance with approved flushing practice--as set out in the HSE's L8 Approved Code of Practice on controlling Legionella bacteria in water systems, and the new HTM 04-01, Safe Water in Healthcare Premises. As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports, the hospital's use of Digital Missives' L8guard software system has also saved considerable staff time, eliminated the need to manually input data from thousands of paper flushing return forms, and enabled the Estates team to easily identify departments not undertaking regular flushing.