Medical Warehouse Flooring

Flowcrete India is able to supply the pharmaceutical industry with flooring solutions that meet strict sanitation requirements to ensure that medicinal products stored in warehouses are maintained in ideal conditions.

Warehouse and storage facilities in general require flooring that needs to meet the demands of the day-to-day activities taking place in onsite. Special considerations must be adhered to if the storage facility houses pharmaceutical equipment and products, as hygiene is paramount. This category of products needs to be kept at a specific temperature, transported with the utmost care, labelled discretely for security reasons and kept perfectly sterile.

Drugs must be stored in appropriate conditions to prevent contamination and must be packaged appropriately to allow for inspection and to ensure that they are stored in the correct area of the facility. Different drugs have vastly different requirements in terms of the temperature at which they must be stored, as well as the levels of humidity and exposure to light that they can tolerate. Failure to maintain the regulated environment for storage could pose a health risk to the user or handler and cause irreparable damage to the reputation of the manufacturer.

The flooring required for storage areas should be able to support the weight of the stored goods, and be able to tolerate wheeled traffic, weighty stacked racks and heavy pallets, which can cause wear and tear on the floor due to the sheer weight and frequency of movement across the floor’s surface.

Durability is important, as any floor failure can lead to bacteria and chemicals seeping into a cracked or peeling surface. This scenario increases the likelihood of bacteria being transferred around the facility on wheeled equipment or on the shoes of staff, increasing the chances of contamination.

Since the pharmaceutical industry is highly contamination sensitive, great care must be taken to ensure that every step of the operation and every aspect of the facilities involved are designed to protect the products.

Pharmaceutical products that are out-dated, damaged, exposed to the air or in stages of deterioration should always be stored in a quarantined area away from other products or equipment. These areas of quarantine require stain resistant and slip resistant flooring due to the risk of spillages of drugs or damaged goods. This type of flooring should also be seamless for ease of cleanability, as dropped or spilled medicines will have no joints or gaps to hide in, and can therefore be quickly and easily cleaned away, thus maintaining the sanitation of the entire facility.

It’s not just the floor in the main warehouse that needs to be considered, as separate areas such as kitchens, toilets and food storage pantries need to have fit-for-purpose floors in order to prevent risks of vermin infestation in the warehouse.

Aside from hygiene issues, if chemicals or other corrosive substances come into contact with a damaged floor, the probability of the substances reaching the substrate is increased. Damage to the substrate poses a risk to the structural integrity of the floor and can lead to expensive but necessary refurbishment that could put the entire facility out of action for a prolonged period of time.

Flowcrete India offers seamless, hard-wearing flooring systems for such critical environments that eliminate openings, voids or grout lines where dirt, bacteria or chemicals can become trapped. Non-permeable and antibacterial systems, such as the Flowfresh range also come with optional contiguous coving.

The resin flooring specialists can even provide medical warehouses with electrostatic dissipative (ESD) flooring for areas where highly sensitive electronic equipment is used. Other specialist benefits include flooring that exhibits very low levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to ensure that the site’s interior air quality is as clean as possible.

Other ways to improve the sanitation and safety of such a facility is to have clear areas where certain tasks are performed or certain products are stored. These areas should never change and should be clear to all who use the facility to reduce the risk of cross-contamination. One way that this can be achieved is by using coloured demarcation on the floor to warn employees or visitors that they are leaving one area of the site and entering another. Clear walkways can also be defined easily, to ensure that potentially sensitive zones are avoided by unauthorised people.

The potency of vaccines, sera, test kits and many other items depends on cold storage. Vaccines in particular are temperature sensitive and must be kept at precisely controlled temperatures from the point of manufacture to the point of administration. Cold chain defects are frequent causes of problems in immunisation programs. Flooring in extremely temperature sensitive areas must be sterile and able to withstand consistent low temperature conditions for long periods of time. The floors would also need to combat extreme thermal shock from steam cleaning as well as thermal cycling from seasonal changes to avoid failure.

Aside from the coating systems themselves, sealants and topcoats from Flowcrete India prevent the ingress of bacteria contamination and help to stop contaminated liquids from reaching the floor coating. Visit Flowcrete.in to explore the full range of ultra-hygienic flooring solutions.