Touring the Laundry

We got to tour a medical laundering facility today! I was on an engineering-geek-high all afternoon.

This is a bale load of compacted "transient" laundry, or sheets and such that don't have a hospital home, in front of bales of compacted plastic bags (which hospitals wrap their used sheets in). It's apparently about 1200lbs of sheets. The transient sheets end up here by hitchhiking in a hospital's normal linens after being left at the hospital by an ambulance service, who apparently don't keep track of their sheets. They're a purple color so they can be easily distinguished from standard laundry. The hospitals don't take them back, so their fate here is as of yet unknown.

And this is just one of the many beautiful tidbits of information I learned today as I try to better understand the complex maze of healthcare resource use.