One of the down sides of traveling is often the dryness of hotel rooms. It is very hard to control the humidity level in a hotel room. Why is this an issue for me, you wonder? Well, first it is the static electricity that takes place in dry rooms which causes those mild shocks as well as the dry skin. Yes, a man worried about dry skin. Well, it itches!

I have tried many different solutions to help control the dryness in hotel rooms. The easiest is to leave many cups of water all over the room. I wonder sometimes what the housekeeper thinks I am up to.  My next favorite is to run the shower to create a steam mist. Lastly, is to have a few bottles of water next to my bed and when I wake up, drink them to rehydrate my body.

Why talk about this subject of humidity and especially relative humidity while I travel? Relative humidity and controlling it in a medical facility, especially the Sterile Processing and Operating Room areas, is a topic in the industry right now.  For that reason, we have posted some articles and updates on this subject this week in our newsfeed. One of the articles is from a publication called Controlled Environments and it deals mostly with clean rooms, but the information that hit home to me was the detailed discussion about relative humidity.

What is important to remember is that monitoring relative humidity in facilities is important and it has a direct impact on patient care. If we better understand the factors that impact relative humidity, we can control it better. Hopefully you will not be placing water cups in different areas of your department, like I do in my room when I travel. That would not be looked on kindly by Infection Control, TJC, CMS, etc.!