Cleaning a medical center is not the same as cleaning a house. The risk of spreading contaminants is high, and it’s important to equip housekeeping staff with the tools they need to not only clean, but sanitize. While there are endless tips and tricks to reduce the spread of pathogens and improve cleanliness, two key ideas appear below. Even though housekeepers and janitorial staff are meant to stop the spread of infection, substandard and outdated housekeeping supplies can turn these lifesaving staff members and their tools into walking biohazards.
Disposable Protection
Issuing proper PPE is essential to protecting your employees. PPE simply stands for Personal Protetive Equipment. Nothing protects your employees better than disposable PPE products. While no medical professional would buy reusable gloves, many medical centers choose to reuse some housekeeping supplies rather than replacing them with disposables.
Not only do disposable products keep your housekeeping staff safe, but they also help maintain sanitation in patient rooms and public spaces. By changing PPE that comes into contact with potentially contaminated surfaces, your staff can restrict the contaminants’ movement. Changing gloves between every room, for example, prevents one patient’s cold from hitching a free ride on a housekeeper’s gloves. Since housekeeping duties require contact with touch points in a room, disposable products are critical to sanitation. Remember that reusable rags, mop heads, and other cloth products carry the same risks. Disposable wipes and scrubbing pads are always the most sanitary options. However, if you must use reusable items, be sure to have enough for each room to have its own. No rag should wipe down two rooms, and no mop head should scrub more than one floor between trips to the laundry room. Of course, even the journey to the laundry room increases the chances of accidental contamination along the way.
Sanitary Storage
While it is the job of housekeepers and janitors to keep medical centers clean, the closets and backrooms where their supplies are stored are often less sanitary than the areas they clean. And since housekeepers typically clean patient rooms and public spaces on a daily basis, they usually have the opportunity to clean their own storage closets no more than once a week. Because these storage units can hold everything from heavy blankets, to patient robes, to textile cleaning tools, it’s important to keep them clean. Without an increase in staff, however, this is implausible for many medical centers.
The alternative is to store housekeeping supplies smarter. Zip lock bags come in all shapes and sizes for a reason. They essentially hold anything you need to keep clean and dry. Since most janitorial closets have a tap for filling mop buckets and chemical sprays, it’s easy for traces of mold to grow and hide in stored textiles, paper products, and managerial supplies like notebooks and records. Mold is an irritant to most people, but it’s also deadly to many patients. By storing vulnerable products in zip lock bags, housekeepers can preempt the threat. Zip lock bags are also easy to organize, not to mention well sealed. This means housekeepers need not suffer the pain of dropping the last clean towels on a dirty floor ever again.
These two simple changes can make a huge difference in sanitation and safety. Those in need of medical care need a safer, cleaner environment than most. It’s better to never know how many lives have been saved by preventative measures than to recognize even a handful of deaths that could have been prevented by better housekeeping supplies.