As winter weather continues to impact portions of our service area, Crown Health Care Laundry Services is actively monitoring conditions and taking proactive steps to support your facility while prioritizing the safety of our teams. We understand the critical role you play in caring for your community, and we are prepared to support you before, during, and after this weather event. While many deliveries were proactively completed early, there is the potential for delays to Monday deliveries in impacted areas due to road conditions. If any changes to your delivery schedule become necessary, your Crown customer service team will communicate directly with you.

At this time, if your facility is located in a storm impacted area, we encourage you to partner with us by implementing Linen Conservation Mode to support linen availability during this weather event.

Linen Conservation Mode: Guidance for Your Facility

• Prioritize Linen for Critical Care Areas: Allocate linen first to inpatient units, emergency departments, ICUs, and other essential patient-care areas.
• Recover Linen from Areas That Are Closed or Operating at Reduced Capacity: Pull clean linen from outpatient surgery, rehab, imaging, elective procedure areas, and other departments that may be closed for multiple days. Use this inventory to supplement critical care areas.
• Move to Emergency Bed Change Practices: Implement emergency bed change status on patient floors. Beds should only be changed when clinically necessary. Communicate this directive clearly to nursing leadership and department managers.
• Secure and Control High-Demand Items: Pull scrubs from locker rooms and secure them in a controlled location. Issue scrubs only as needed for clinical care. Scrubs should not be used for sleeping or as personal clothing.
• Encourage Personal Clothing When Appropriate: When clinically appropriate, encourage staff and patients to bring personal clothing for overnight stays to help reduce scrub and gown usage.
• Protect Patient Linen for Patient Care Only: Do not use patient linen for cleanups, spills, leaks, or water intrusion. Use ragged-out linen or rags for environmental or cleanup needs. Crown can assist with arranging rag inventory if needed.
• Issue Linen on an As-Needed Basis Only: During weather events, linen becomes especially valuable. Controlled, as-needed issuance helps extend availability when delivery timing may be impacted.
• Coordinate Closely with Your Crown Team: Work directly with your Crown representative to review on-hand inventory, usage trends, and any recommended temporary adjustments.

How Crown Supports You

1. To help ensure service continuity, we have taken the following steps in advance of the storm:
2. Ordered additional pre-washed linen to arrive ahead of the storm to support ongoing service needs.
3. Pre-positioned linen in secure, designated locations to allow for faster recovery and uninterrupted service following the storm.
4. We are actively monitoring weather and road conditions through our logistics team so delivery routes can be adjusted quickly and safely as needed.
5. Implemented strong power contingency plans, including standby generators and access to two mobile generators, each capable of powering a Crown Processing Facility in the event of outages.
6. For locations supported by Crown Internal Distribution Teams, arranging hotel accommodations near hospitals to ensure staff can remain onsite and available without transportation disruptions.

Stay Prepared with Crown

Following these recommendations and working with Crown, your facility will remain well-equipped during this winter storm. For additional support or to add rags to your order, please contact your Crown representative or email us at contactus@crownlaundry.com. Thank you for trusting Crown to stand by your side. Stay safe and warm!