Authors (including presenting author) :
NG CL, CHAN LC, TAM MP, LAU CW, CHANG HY, CHAK YT
Affiliation :
Physiotherapy Department , Pok Oi Hospital , New Territories West Cluster
Introduction :
Wax therapy is one of the common physiotherapy modalities for treatment on patient. The wax for treatment of upper extremities can be reused after disinfection. During the conventional disinfection process, the used wax will be put into a boiler to be heated up to 135 degrees for 15 minutes. Two straps of bandages will be immersed into the melt wax which will be left for cooling down into a wax brick for re-use. The wax brick will be taken out from the boiler by using the two straps of bandages. It is labor demanding to take out the wax brick from the boiler and time consuming to separate the wax from the bandages. Moreover, some of the wax will be wasted as it is difficult to separate them from the bandages. Therefore, an innovative idea was invented for wax disinfection recycling process.
Objectives :
To compare the conventional wax disinfection process and the new method of wax disinfection in terms of amount of wax reserved for re-use and efficiency of the recycling process
Methodology :
For the new disinfection recycling process of wax, the used wax of 4 kilograms was put into a boiler to be heated up to 135 degrees for 15 minutes as usual. A stainless steel handle was put into the melt wax and was left for cooling into a wax brick. The time to separate the wax brick and the amount of wax that can be separated for re-use from the stainless steel handle and the bandages were compared
Result & Outcome :
The time to separate the wax brick of 4 kilograms from the stainless handle was 5 minutes whereas the time to separate the wax brick from the bandage was 60 minutes.Therefore, there was 92% reduction in handling time for the new method of wax recycling. The amount of wax reserved for re-use was 4 kilograms and 3.6 kilograms with the method of stainless steel handle and bandages respectively. Therefore the amount of wax reserved for re-use was 10% more for the new method than the conventional method.The innovative idea of using a stainless steel handle during the disinfection recycling process of wax helps to reserve more amount of wax for re-use and decrease the time of disinfection process. It promotes the 'green concept' of recycling of used wax to save material , save time and manpower during the disinfection process.
Co-location with:
