Infection Control and Prevention with Non-Invasive Ventilation Equipment

This research study is investigating the effectiveness of current cleaning and disinfection procedures used for home non-invasive ventilation (NIV) or continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) devices. Small organisms (microbes) such as bacteria or fungus can potentially be present on this equipment. The use of routine disinfection processes should remove these organisms. However, there has been limited investigation into whether NIV devices can become contaminated and how effective current cleaning processes are. The objective is to investigate whether microbes, similar to what is in your sputum (lung mucous), are present on or inside the NIV or CPAP device prior to and after cleaning. Most people who use NIV or CPAP at home require the use of a loan pool device in order to trial therapy and/or qualify for government funded equipment. These devices are always cleaned and disinfected by staff between patients. This process includes cleaning all accessible surfaces with special medical grade wipes and changing the filter. For this study, swabs of your NIV or CPAP machine and an air sample are going to be taken before and after the machine is cleaned using our normal cleaning process to test if the cleaning process removes any microbes that happen to be present on or in the device after you have used it. The most important outcome of this study is comparing the number of microbes before and after we clean the device to look at how well the cleaning processes work. Microbes are everywhere in the world and inside your body and are a normal part of our environment. We are not trying to show that your machine is more or less “dirty”. We aim to show that cleaning processes work effectively by demonstrating that less microbes exist after cleaning. We are particularly interested if any microbes which might harm people with lung problems might be present on the devices, or in the air flow after they are cleaned. We do not want you to take any additional steps to “disinfect’ your machine prior to our assessment because we need some normal environmental microbes to be present for this investigation to be useful.