Hospital uses VOC detector
To help ensure the on-going health and safety of its 4000-strong workforce, especially those with known chemical sensitivities, Canada’s St Boniface Hospital has ordered a handheld Tiger volatile organic compound (VOC) detector from Ion Science.
The high performance PID instrument is being used by the tertiary care facility to monitor levels of potentially harmful emissions from housekeeping products such as paints, adhesives, floor coatings, new furniture and sanitisers.
Purchased from Ion Science’s Canadian distributor, Levitt Safety, the Tiger will be used several times a month by St Boniface Hospital’s health and safety team to obtain a single snapshot reading and for logging data which is then downloaded and converted into graph format for inclusion in hygiene surveys. These are then reported across the department that has been monitored.
Taras Stecy, safety co-ordinator at St Boniface Hospital, said: “We are committed to providing a safe working environment for our staff and patients alike. We had a few issues with VOC levels in the past so decided to introduce an on-going monitoring process. Plus we know that some staff have sensitivities to VOCs and felt an obligation to protect them from the risk of overexposure.
A robust hand held VOC detector, Tiger provides a dynamic detection range of 1 parts per billion (ppb) to 20,000 parts per million (ppm). When operating in humid and contaminated environments, it provides stable, repeatable readings.
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