Carlton Relf, Managing Director at Maidscando, reports.
The NHS sees 300,000 healthcare-associated infections from the ten million operations it performs every year. Private healthcare/NHS Private Patient Units see around 1 in 1000 of their 500,000 patients annually needing emergency care after treatment complications. Meanwhile, the latest UK Health Security Agency data, show C difficile and MRSA cases at levels not seen for more than a decade.
Barriers to progress
These incidents could involve infections spreading in high-use areas, or failures of cleaning regimes across complex buildings and treatment settings. Despite important reforms in UK healthcare cleaning, especially the NHS National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2021, and private sector initiatives such as the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN), NHS trusts, private hospitals and FM/cleaning departments can still struggle to meet cleanliness requirements and regulatory compliance demands amid unprecedented UK demand for care.
Despite clearer cleaning standards, there are still gaps in healthcare organisations achieving best practice cleaning regimes. Barriers to ensuring safe and healthy spaces for patients, staff, and visitors, include:
- Risk of cross-contamination – from surfaces, equipment, and different rooms
- Frequency of cleaning amid high patient volumes in high-use areas like hospital theatres
- Regulatory compliance – healthcare providers must adhere to the latest regulations and standards to avert infections, extended hospital stays and enforced deep cleans
- Hazards from ancillary activity such as handling and segregation of hazardous waste.
Five ways to enhanced cleanliness
Thankfully, specialised healthcare cleaning regimes, supported by highly-qualified cleaning contractors, are raising cleaning standards when they exhibit five core capabilities:
Expert knowledge
First, cleaning providers that maintain all current industry accreditations for their teams will give clients the confidence that they can operate to required standards across multiple healthcare and ancillary settings - and respond effectively to emergencies.
Trained cleaning staff can prioritise and complete cleaning tasks for each individual facility’s risk level without additional guidance, saving time and minimising errors. Cleaning teams trained for disease outbreaks can respond quickly, increasing cleaning frequency, using specialised disinfectants, and enact infection control measures such as using PPE.
Relentless compliance
Second, contractors need relentless adherence to health and safety & environmental regulations. For NHS applications, compliance with the 2021 cleanliness standards and their audit processes is being baked in to hospital cleaning contracts. Contractors can not only use swab tests to identify potential surface contamination from the very first clean but also quickly escalate tests where positive results are received. For tasks such as biohazardous waste removal, cleaning teams that are professionally trained on waste removal, storage protocols and relevant equipment’s operation, can minimise staff, visitor, or colleagues’ exposure to biohazards and infection.
Specialist approaches
Third, trained contractors can make optimum use of specialised equipment and products for optimal cleaning and driving up contract performance. Effective use of relevant cleaning agents and equipment – ensuring the right concentrations to kill pathogens will lead to optimal eradication of infections with reduced wastage – reduces the likelihood of costly infection control interventions and extended hospital stays and saves on overall operating costs. Contractors are using technologies to monitor buildings’ usage and footfalls and adjust cleaning schedules; this includes use of robots and advanced cleaning equipment for cleaning lower-risk areas like corridors, freeing colleagues’ time for deep cleaning of higher-risk locations.
Reducing HCAIs
Fourth, effective cleaning standards play a crucial role in reducing risks from healthcare-associated infections. HCAIs not only endanger patient health but can also lead to higher overall treatment costs and mortality rates. Regularly-trained cleaning teams can improve cleanliness for high touch surfaces, such as door knobs and medical equipment that requires frequent disinfection. Suitably-qualified teams can select the correct disinfectants for different surfaces and situations. Carefully-executed cleaning of treatment rooms can help release them earlier and provide the potential for increased procedures.
Dynamic audits
Fifth, specialist cleaning contractors help ensure quality for inspection and auditing in support of higher standards. Forward-looking cleaning contractors now use electronic logging and reporting to deliver detailed job service reports, relevant cleaning and environmental management processes and relevant employee qualifications. This data helps private sector / NHS cleaning teams simplify reporting and demonstrate regulatory compliance as well as supporting simpler data analysis for driving cleanliness improvements.
The NHS 2021 standards emphasise the value of readily-accessible cleaning data for trusts, not only to review cleaning schedules hourly, daily, and weekly, but also to manage fast-changing cleaning demands across their property estates more flexibly while ensuring accurate information for rigorous auditing.
Higher standards
Cleaning contractors achieving higher cleaning standards, better matching their resources to cleaning demands and ensuring compliance is never just box-ticking; it’s about specialists promoting a culture of excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement, to deliver higher standards of cleanliness for UK healthcare.
www.maidscando.co.uk