Healthcare Facility Pest Control

Houston Healthcare Pest Management

Houston area hospitals and medical facilities are intended to be places of health and healing. In any healthcare setting, pests are unacceptable as some can transmit diseases and the need to promote the overall cleanliness of a facility. However, a medical facility has everything a pest needs to live: food, warmth, shelter and a steady supply of transient human beings to ferry them into a facility.

Pest control in hospitals, nursing homes and other residential health care settings requires an approach that relies primarily on non-chemical control measures and minimizes the use of pesticides.

Cypress Creek Pest Detectives

We never stop looking. We look for current pest problems, but we also look for problems that may favor pest problems in the future. For example, our technicians check:

• Cracks and crevices that can provide harborage for pests
• Missing or improperly-installed door sweeps, broken or unscreened windows, and other potential pest ingress areas
• Areas in need of sanitation attention
• Spilled or improperly-stored food items
• Overflowing or damaged dumpsters (those with poorly-fitting lids, for example)
• Leaks and other moisture problems

To assist us in inspecting, we use a variety of non-toxic traps and monitoring devices, including pheromone traps when needed. These traps not only provide early warning, but also serve a control purpose, especially in the case of stored food pests.

Non-Chemical Control Measures

As is the case with all of our pest control services, our pest control plans for hospitals rely on non-chemical control as the primary pest control strategy. In fact, we consider it a success when our technicians don’t apply any pesticides at all during a routine visit.

Depending on your building and your specific pest problems, the non-chemical control measures we’ll employ will consist of some combination of the following:

• Inspection, of course (Did we mention that we never stop inspecting?)
• Identification and sealing or potential pest entry and harborage areas. This is known as “pest exclusion” in the lingo of our profession
• Caulking of cracks and crevices in the kitchen, food storage, and food service areas
• Correction of moisture problems (clogged drains, leaky faucets, etc.)
• Non-toxic pheromone traps, light traps, sticky traps, or mechanical rodent traps, if needed at your hospital
• Air curtains at entrances and exits, if needed
• Pest-resistant chimney caps and ventilation covers, bird spikes, and other wildlife-exclusion measures, if needed

Depending on the nature of the problem, we’ll either correct these problems ourselves, or notify your maintenance or housekeeping staff so they may address them. In either case, we will report our findings, actions, and recommendations to your designated contact person, and record same in your pest control log book.

Judicious Application of Pesticides

When absolutely needed, we apply the smallest, most precise dosages of the least-hazardous pest control products that will be effective at clearing up the particular pest problem. All of the products we use are specifically labeled for hospital and health care facilities, and fall into the EPA’s lowest hazard class, except for a few that are so non-toxic that the EPA doesn’t even require them to be registered as pesticides.

When we say “precise application,” we mean exactly that. It’s not at all uncommon for our technicians to treat an entire facility using only a few grams of insecticide, applied as a gel bait, and injected into cracks with a syringe. We don’t practice the old-fashioned “surround and drown” method of pest control. The less pesticide we apply, the better it is for all concerned.

Whether you’re a private-practice physician, dentist, chiropractor, mental health provider, or other health professional with an outpatient office; a free-standing urgent care center; a medical laboratory; or the administrator of a hospital, nursing home, or residential rehabilitation center; we can custom-design an Integrated Pest Management plan that is guaranteed to be tough on pests, but easy on your patients and our environment.