North Heights Linen Service enters nationwide partnership with Medline, creating more jobs

AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - The North Heights Linen Service has announced a partnership with Medline, one of the nation’s largest health care distributors.

Medline’s Ready-to-Use pre-laundered and pre-packaged linens go through a rigorous sanitizing and handling process and are critical in supporting healthcare workers.

“If you think about a patient bed, all patient beds have bed sheets, pillowcases, you need a towel or washcloth in the hospital, or in a nursing home, so it’s impactful, very important that all those products between patients are effectively laundered, thoroughly cleaned and returned back to reduce or eliminate cross contamination between patients,” said John Piazzi, director, product management, Medline’s textile division.

North Heights Linen Service is able to do that step for Medline.

This partnership is also helping meet staff and supply shortage issues.

“It’s a tough perspective to have to not be able to bring health care providers, product and solution to keep their facilities up and running, so this product allows for, you know, a seamless integration of new products, doesn’t have to go through the laundering process, because that’s already been provided by North Heights,” said Piazzi.

North Heights Linen Service is the only facility in the Texas Panhandle certified to accommodate health care linens, before laundry had to be shipped all the way to Albuquerque or Oklahoma City, impacting possible jobs and money for the Panhandle.

“Bringing Medline here to Amarillo, North Heights community what it’s going to do is we’re going to employ more people with that those people will be gainfully employed and of course it will bring North Heights back in to what it used to be, so people won’t detour going around north heights they’ll begin to come this way,” said Leonard Cantly, chief engineer and operations manager, North Heights Linen Service.

Cantly says right now, they have a little over 20 employees, but with this new partnership the business could potentially have a staff up to 100.

“We basically want to hire those people who are hard to hire, those who need a second chance,” said Cantly.

Cantly believes this will ultimately help the North Heights community overall.

“You know I’ve lived here my whole life, North Heights has been in a steady decline, you know everything moves out South, East and West, so to bring a big business like this here then people will start seeing business fluctuate, start seeing more revenue, people start spending more money,” said Cantly.

Not only do employees have a job with the linen service, but free financial literacy classes are also offered on-site through a partnership with Amarillo College.

“It’s a catalyst for bigger things and bigger business and it’s going to reach people more than just being a production worker,” said Cantly.

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