A new edition for BIFMA HCF8.1

BIFMA recently issued a new edition for BIFMA HCF8.1 – Health Care Furniture Design For Cleanability.  This is the third version of that standard.  Other that a few editorial changes and clarifications, the major technically significant changes were with section 7: “Assessing Coated Fabrics for Resistance to Liquid Cleaners and/or Disinfectants” where the cycle number went from 14 to 5; and  Section 10 – Assessing Woven Fabrics for Resistance to Liquid Cleaners and/or Disinfectants – which was added to the document.

This document is a guideline, not a standard.  It should therefore be taken as such and cannot really be used for compliance purposes as this test protocol in many respects lacks the details required for a test lab to run a test accurately.  For example, in section 6, different cleaners are specified to evaluate the surface resistance to cleaners. One of the cleaners is Hydrogen Peroxide (HP).  Various types of HP solutions can be used for testing a surface including an acid activated version.  These different solutions will attack surfaces to various degrees depending on their actual compositions and concentrations (none of those parameters are specified).

Another example is section 9 – Resistance of furniture to UV light.  That section was created to assess material resistance to the UV light used by disinfection equipment which bombards surfaces with UVc light. As a reference, below is the sun emission spectrum (Source: Q-LAB, Technical Bulletin LU-0822) where you see the separation between Visible light, UV-a, UV-b and the UV-c regions.

BIFMA HCF 8.1, section 9.3.1, recommends using a germicidal light source capable of providing radiant energy in the spectral UV-c wavele