How Automated Cleaning Improves Resident Safety and Staff Support

Senior care communities continually face the challenge of properly cleaning durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs, commodes, raised toilet seats, and walkers. When this responsibility falls solely on staff, critical steps in cleaning and disinfection are often overlooked. Just as concerning, the manual process pulls caregivers away from other essential duties. As technology advances in the senior care industry, automated cleaning solutions can help ensure thorough disinfection, reduce staff burden, improve retention, and ultimately enhance residents’ quality of care.

Where Manual Cleaning Falls Short

Karl Soderquist, president of The HUBSCRUB Company

For decades, senior care communities have relied on staff to manually clean equipment, but this approach has notable limitations. Manual cleaning often leads to incomplete or inconsistent disinfection due to several factors:

• Disinfectant concentrates must be mixed with water at precise ratios, and manual preparation is prone to errors.
• Equipment such as wheelchairs, with numerous surfaces and hard-to-reach areas, is extremely difficult to clean thoroughly by hand.
• Disinfectants require a specific dwell time to be effective, yet staff often lack the time to follow this requirement during manual cleaning.

Manual cleaning also has a number of other downsides:

• Spraying disinfectants onto durable medical equipment creates an aerosol mist, which staff in close proximity can inadvertently inhale.
• Outdoor cleaning requires access to an approved drain line, but such facilities are not always available in senior care communities.
• Staff must handle cleaning tools and materials such as towels and scrub brushes, which increases their risk of exposure to the very infectious diseases they are trying to prevent.

With staffing shortages affecting so many communities, assigning valuable staff time to manual cleaning is increasingly impractical. “Today, particularly in hospitals and nursing homes, even nurses are faced with having to clean a wheelchair,” explains Karl Soderquist, president of The HUBSCRUB Company. He notes that nurses are often so busy that they cannot thoroughly clean and disinfect every component of a wheelchair. Instead, they typically wipe only the most obvious high-touch areas, leaving many other surfaces untouched.

“Part of the crux here is these facilities are facing some tough times with respect to manpower,” says Soderquist. Manually cleaning a wheelchair can take 15 to 20 minutes, tying up valuable staff time and resources. A cleaning solution that eliminates this demand frees staff to focus on resident care—a clear win for the entire community.

How Automated Cleaning Helps Solve Common Challenges

Automated cleaning solutions like HUBSCRUB offer a solution to the significant challenges and drawbacks of manual cleaning. HUBSCRUB is easy to use and delivers a thorough, precise cleaning and disinfection process, without requiring staff to spend time preparing equipment such as wheelchairs. “You take that piece of equipment, put it in the machine, close the door, hit the button, and with disinfection, you’re finished in six to seven minutes,” explains Soderquist. “You’ve cleaned, rinsed, and disinfected it the way it should be done.” HUBSCRUB provides a faster, fully automated cleaning and disinfection process that requires no staff oversight. Staff avoid direct contact with cleaning supplies, and its enclosed design prevents exposure to fumes.

Another key advantage of automated cleaning solutions is their ability to be precisely programmed. This ensures a thorough, comprehensive process that eliminates the errors and oversights common with manual cleaning. Once set, the machine delivers the same high-quality results every time, providing a level of consistency that human effort simply cannot match. In cleaning and disinfection, that consistency translates to greater accuracy, reliability, and effectiveness.

One of the greatest advantages of automated cleaning is the support it provides to staff. With HUBSCRUB, the burden of cleaning and disinfecting equipment is almost entirely removed from their responsibilities. Instead of spending valuable time scrubbing equipment, staff can simply load it into the machine and walk away. This eliminates a physically demanding, time-consuming task and allows caregivers to focus more on residents. Communities that invest in this technology not only ease staff workloads but also demonstrate that they value and support their teams. This can improve morale, reduce stress, and even strengthen staff retention.

Should Your Community Invest in Automated Cleaning?

Although automated cleaning solutions like HUBSCRUB require a significant upfront investment, their long-term value becomes clear when considering the benefits delivered over years of use. “I have machines out there running at 14 and 15 years old,” says Soderquist. “You need to look at it and say yes, it is expensive, but I’m getting a much better job. I really do want to make sure that a person doesn’t get an infection,” he says. With HUBSCRUB employees can focus on caring for residents instead of being pulled away to handle the repetitive, time-consuming task of cleaning equipment.

The popularity and demand for automated cleaning has grown so much that some companies, such as durable medical equipment rental and sales providers, have invested in HUBSCRUB units themselves. These companies offer cleaning services to their communities by picking up, disinfecting, and returning equipment. This way, even organizations that don’t own a HUBSCRUB unit can still benefit from its precise, thorough cleaning and disinfection capabilities.

Alternatively, some senior care communities opt to rent a unit. There are also small businesses that offer this service under a rental contract agreement, with one company operating multiple units to serve more than 75 accounts. Some facilities rent a unit for a few days and do the cleaning themselves. Whether through short-term rentals or contracted services, the flexibility of automated cleaning provides multiple options—each representing a significant improvement in meeting the critical need for thoroughly disinfecting patient equipment.

Whatever approach makes the most financial sense, investing in automated cleaning is a smart investment for senior care communities. By reducing staff burden, enhancing morale, and supporting resident safety, automated cleaning delivers measurable improvements in both workforce stability and quality of care, offering long-term value that communities can rely on.

Paige Cerulli

Paige Cerulli is a contributing writer to i Advance Senior Care.