Fraser Health is improving its system for sanitizing its facilities by acquiring what it calls disinfection pods.
Those pods reflect and trap UV rays and they are essentially moveable containment areas that can hold items such as wheelchairs, incubators and IV poles. The health region's robots can then enter the pod and emit short pulses of ultraviolet light to damage the DNA and RNA of harmful pathogens.
Without the pods, the equipment would still be able to be disinfected but because it would be out in the open in a room, it would cause the hospital or other facility to temporarily close the room.
Fraser Health launched what it calls its Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI) program in 2016 and was using two robots: Phoenix and Haley. In 2020, it added 14 more robots, including one named Bonnie and one named Henry, after Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry.
The robots cost a total of about $2 million and were funded by donors.
Since Fraser Health's UVGI program launched, the region has seen fewer hospital-acquired infections such as C. difficile and MRSA, according to Fraser Health.
It estimated that its robot fleet has disinfected nearly 62,000 rooms in the past 21 months.
Fraser Health is B.C.'s largest health region, and includes cities such as Burnaby, Coquitlam and Maple Ridge as well as Surrey, White Rock and cities out as far as Hope.
The robots keep an internal time-sheet of where and when they work, and then send the data to a server so Fraser Health can monitor usage.
Robots are increasingly used in a wide range of industries. GreenCo Robots CEO Liang Yu told BIV that he has sold or rented robots to owners of nearly 50 B.C. restaurants to deliver meals to tables.
Richmond's Happy Lamb Hot Pot restaurant in mid-2021 was the first in the province to have a GreenCo robot.
