Clean, well-maintained healthcare facilities tell hospital patients that theirs is a safe, healthy, aesthetically pleasing facility, making a positive impression, not only on patients but visitors as well.
However, when it comes to cleaning medical facilities, quality professional cleaning is even more critical. It helps reduce pathogen burdens, helps avoid patient complications, improves staff morale, and even results in better patient outcomes.
Add one more especially important thing—quality, professional cleaning helps minimize health-care-acquired infections, HAIs, which are a severe problem in all American healthcare facilities, including those here in Florida.
A health-care-acquired infection, as the name implies, is a disease that someone gets (acquires) while in or visiting a healthcare facility. He or she did not come into the hospital “carrying” that disease.
To show you how serious this is, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
· On any given day, about one in 31 U.S. hospital patients has at least one HAI.
· There are about 700,000 HAIs in U.S. hospitals each year.
· About 72,000 patients die from HAIs.
· It is estimated that HAIs cost the United States nearly $10 billion annually.
Regarding these costs, we should note that in most cases, insurance providers and government agencies will not pay doctors and hospitals for treating patients with HAIs that occurred in their facilities. With the high cost of medicine in the United States, this one must be paid out of the hospitals pocket.
Further, with COVID-19 and hospitals throughout the country (including those here in Florida filled with coronavirus patients), the number of patients contracting an HAI may be even higher. Busy, overcrowded hospitals are a perfect environment for HAIs.
Keeping a Healthcare Facility Clean and Healthy
Now that we have a better understanding of what medical facilities are grappling with when it comes to HAIs, here are five cleaning-related suggestions to help housekeepers and medical facility administrators minimize this serious problem:
Floor mops. Make sure your cleaning staff is using flat microfiber mops to clean patient rooms. These are more effective at removing pathogens from floors, plus they tend to use fewer chemicals and less water—improving drying time and reducing costs. Also, the mop and cleaning solution should be changed after each room is cleaned. This helps prevent pathogens from one room’s floor being mopped onto a new room’s floor.
Disinfectant one-step. Housekeepers, often in their rush to clean patient rooms, forget that the proper disinfecting of surfaces usually takes two steps. First, surfaces must be cleaned with an all-purpose cleaner. Then, the disinfectant is applied to those same surfaces. Service Keepers has combined these two steps into a one-step process that allows for both cleaning and disinfecting to happen all at once. Using our disinfectant cleaner, we can provide effective, safe and efficient cleaning-disinfecting services. Along with our one-step solution, we use our color-coded microfiber system to prevent cross contamination – assigning different colors of microfiber cloths to different areas.
Infection Control. What is proving to be a blessing because of the pandemic are electrostatic sprayers. This is not new technology: it was introduced in the 1930s but for industrial purposes. However, today these technologies allow housekeepers to disinfect large areas in a medical facility quickly. Plus, because the disinfectant attaches to surfaces, they can thoroughly disinfect hard-to-reach surface areas.
PPE. Housekeepers must always wear gloves, goggles, and face shields, especially now due to COVID. This helps protect their health. But what about reducing HAIs? They must also make sure they change these and other protective gear frequently, especially when cleaning in different areas of the medical facility. This will help minimize HAIs.
Contracting. Most hospitals in the U.S. are now overcrowded due to the pandemic. Even with a vaccine, it may take another year or two before the pandemic has lifted. Housekeepers are doing all that they can to keep up with this overcrowding challenge and,at the same time, help prevent HAIs. We suggest outsourcing many cleaning duties to an outside cleaning contractor, one with trained, professional staff, aware of a health care facility’s unique cleaning needs. This can free hospital housekeepers to focus more of their attention where they are vitally needed—in patient care areas—and can even prove cost savings.
To learn more, please get in touch today. We are Service Keepers, and we are here for you.
