Intertek, a Total Quality Assurance provider to industries worldwide, has today announced that it has launched surface hygiene testing for facilities and workplaces in the UAE that can test a variety of hard surfaces for evidence of COVID-19. The service is the latest offering as part of Intertek Protek – the world’s first end-to-end health, safety and wellbeing assurance programme for people, workplaces and public spaces.

As employers and businesses across the country prepare to safely reopen their facilities, stringent hygiene standards will become mission critical. Environmental hygiene monitoring of key areas can provide a proactive approach to reducing the risk of spreading the virus and provide peace of mind to employees and customers. Specifically, by testing environmental surfaces, companies can monitor the effectiveness of their hygiene protocols and enable management action such as isolating areas to allow further cleaning.

The Protek service for surface hygiene testing can be performed by Intertek experts at customer sites by taking swabs of surface areas or through customers pre-ordering these and following instructions to collect the samples. The Intertek laboratories are based centrally in the UAE with rapid turnaround time for testing via PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) methodology, allowing the final results to be reported as soon as analysis is complete. This will enable customers to know if evidence of Covid-19 on their surfaces so they can act accordingly.

Intertek Protek’s innovative service offering is designed to support businesses across every sector including hotels, restaurants, transportation hubs and education facilities – all of which are facing the same fundamental challenge of protecting people in their working environment.

Matthew Skinner, Regional Managing Director for Gulf and Pakistan at Intertek, said: “We are working hard at Intertek to safeguard the health, safety and well-being of people, workplaces and public spaces. We take pride in being able to support our customers in making their workplaces and facilities safe for employees and the public. Our latest surface hygiene solution is an essential part of the ongoing health and safety monitoring strategies that business owners will have to put in place. Proactive risk management when it comes to hygiene and surface testing provides them with confidence that they have all the right procedures in place.”

Based on Intertek’s unique, systemic approach to quality assurance, Protek is a comprehensive service offering, providing audits, training and service solutions across people, systems & processes, facilities, materials & surfaces and products. Protek includes end-to-end employee learning and certification solutions, services for operating systems and procedures, assessments of materials and surfaces and services to ensure products are made with quality, safety and sustainability in mind.