Underpinning excellence in healthcare cleaning

EFFECTIVE TRAINING has always been a lynchpin of professional cleaning services but unprecedented UK demand for healthcare and consolidation of the healthcare sector’sexpectations of cleanliness, have made it absolutely mission-critical.

With ever-increasing patient healthcare demands, NHS and private healthcare providers are demanding that cleaning suppliers adhere to higher operating standards while demonstrating compliance with them. But the statistics also show how difficult frontline infection control can be: the NHS has around 300,000 healthcare associated infections (HCAIs) annually.

But the numbers also demonstrate our industry’s essential role in healthcare and other sectors. Analysts IBIS World calculate that industrial cleaning revenues have gone up 5% each year since 2020, especially given rising NHS funding. The British Cleaning Council reckons Britain has 75,000 cleaning businesses and apart from the largest enterprises and SME cleaning firms, most are microbusinesses of fewer than 10 people. As a result, small cleaning firms are often delivering essential services locally to much larger organisations. 

As a result, cleaning companies will increasingly need a focus on training to develop their employees’ cleaning skills within a context of risk assessment, decision-making to best meet customer needs, compliance and service professionalism.

Cleaning firms and better healthcare

Game-changing momentum towards higher healthcare cleaning standards came with theNHS’s National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2021, which reflect more modern methods of cleaning, infection prevention and control (IPC). However, these standards also emphasise transparency in cleaning service delivery, to help assure patients, the public, and staff alike that safe cleanliness standards are being achieved.

Meanwhile, data generated by advances such as robotic cleaning and intelligent building management systems, are transforming NHS and private health sector cleaning managers’ knowledge and understanding of their healthcare facilities’ usage and required cleaningregimes. As a result, cleaning firms are seeing clients drawing up data-driven and moreformal cleaning specifications, and with them, requirements for auditable skill levels in the teams that meet them. 

All these factors are naturally creating new opportunities for cleaning firms but at the same time, they are increasing the pressure on cleaning suppliers to upskill, comprehensively trainand demonstrate the quality / technical skills of their workforces. Commercial cleaning companies will therefore need to organise regular employee and management training while keeping up-to-date workforce training records.

This dual approach - expert cleaning and effective communication of teams’ capabilities to customers - will further build clients’ confidence that they can maintain specified cleaning standards and professionalism to capitalise on these opportunities safely. 

Rigorous training, empowered people

Because of cleaning services’ pivotal role in healthcare, rigorous training not only supports cleaning service excellence but also enables teams to effectively assess and manage changing risks at work, make informed decisions, and set customers’ expectations, at all parts of the customer journey.  Forward looking, highly-qualified cleaning contractors are able to meet these changing client requirements, by equipping their managers and cleaning teams with core capabilities through rigorous training programmes. 

These programmes cover five main areas, including:

1) Engaged and empowered staff

Smart cleaning companies will make comprehensive, rolling training programmes the key to effective and reliable service delivery. Research across many industries shows that fully trained staff feel more empowered and motivated to meet clients’ needs. Engaging and motivating your cleaning teams and individual team members / operatives also means clearly and relentlessly communicating the standards required and what is expected of each team member. But engaging people also means regularly creating ‘no-cost’ rewards, such as complimenting team members for fantastic work, or having suggested a solution to a client’scleaning problem, or dedication to their job such as still making it to a customer site during bad weather. 

2) Core training programmes

As part of providing the best services, cleaning companies’ line managers and cleaning specialists need to maintain a core training programme for all their team members. This will comprise initial site assessments, regular hands-on practice, understanding individual client sites’ reporting needs, required compliance with healthcare standards and reporting, keeping industry accreditations updated, and ongoing education needs.  

Cleaning contractors intent on building their company brand and retaining key contracts based on service excellence will increasingly need to demonstrate relentless alignment with all health and safety & environmental regulations. For NHS applications, compliance with the 2021 cleanliness standards and their audit processes is now a part of new hospital cleaning contracts which in turn triggers a series of training needs for cleaning providers.

A relentless focus on training and accreditation can boost service excellence and cleanliness. For example, fully-trained teams embarking on an NHS or private healthcare contract will be empowered to make checks during a first clean, such as surface contamination tests and escalating the testing level if contamination is identified. For specialised tasks, such as the removal of biohazardous waste, cleaning teams will need training on relevant waste removal, storage protocols and dedicated equipment’s safe operation.

Effective team training can play a key part in reducing HCAIs that may endanger patient health and lead to expensive deep cleans down the line. Fully-trained cleaning teams can be focused on improving cleanliness in hospital or health centres’ high-touch areas, such as medical equipment and high traffic areas. They can also recognise the correct disinfectants for different situations. Well-planned cleaning regimes can enable treatment rooms beingreleased earlier, giving clinical teams scope to increase treatment rates.

There are a plethora of cleaning courses available ranging from individual, team and specialist subject courses, to ‘training the trainer’ type courses enabling senior managers to become accredited trainers for their workforce. The key is to locate training courses within a wider approach of customer service excellence, based on risk identification, decision-making, action and customer communication and expectation-setting. 

3) Education on site needs

Alongside regular training programmes, cleaning teams need to be continually educated and given regular reminders about each site’s cleaning requirements, and client personnel’s expectations, to ensure the highest standards in healthcare cleaning and reporting. 

As well as ensuring excellence in service delivery, rigorously-trained cleaning teams will gain the confidence to quickly prioritise actions for key buildings / locations / ancillary sites. A confident, well-trained team can also check and verify their cleaning responsibilities with their client’s personnel or think outside the box and ask questions when things don’t seem right. This proactive approach can help avert incidents such as:

• Avoiding confusion between in-house FM / cleaning teams and suppliers over required cleaning regimes, for example, whether NHS 2021 national cleanliness standards or legacy 2007 ones are specified

• Property management / cleaning teams being unable to specify effective and safe cleaning regimes to cleaning providers

• Communicating to clients that potentially dangerous tasks like cleans at height need prearranged notice, ensuring suitably-trained teams can complete the work with appropriate equipment supported by in situ safety notices.

4. Dynamic disaster response

With UK healthcare facilities facing unprecedented demand, it’s critical for healthcare organisations to make optimal use of high-use treatment facilities. Cleaning providers can play a crucial role in managing effective disaster responses that can prevent, or at least minimise, service disruption. 

Emergency cleaning situations range from biohazards (bodily fluid spills or contaminated materials), chemical leaks, and food/ beverage spills, but also include smoke damage to building fabric from fires, or accidents like fire extinguishers being discharged. Stormy winters and extreme weather have led to increased flooding incidents and revealed that an ageing NHS property estate is leading to more frequent emergency clean-ups. 

Commercial cleaning companies working with NHS and other public bodies will be responsible for essential daily tasks such as ‘clean and close’ of toilets. Company teams well-versed in incident response can work with hospital / local authority cleaning teams to rapidly assess any incident of abuse / mistreatment of such facilities, close the facilities where safe cleaning isn’t possible and organise a prompt deep clean using approved biohazard equipment and operatives in PPE, to deal correctly with the situation. This incident know-how and dynamic decision-making helps avert potential health risks to hospital / healthcare buildings’ users and minimises facilities’ closure time.

Cleaning providers that maintain regular and refresher employee training and ensure their teams have all necessary industry accreditations, give clients the confidence that they can respond effectively to emergencies. Trained teams will quickly grasp how to make best use of specialised equipment and products for optimal cleaning (such as robot cleaning that automates low-risk cleaning for store rooms or corridors) and help drive up contract performance.

5. Embedding excellence

As teams build up their training with healthcare certifications and recognition programmes, this embedding of know-how empowers operatives, strengthens long-term service delivery, and seals teams’ pride in their work. 

Last year also saw an industry milestone with the launch of the Level 2 Healthcare Cleaning Operative Apprenticeship enabling cleaning companies to fund a recognised qualification and demonstrating that the industry is also helping its people build their career in cleaning - a fine response by our industry to accusations that a job in cleaning never led to qualifications. 

Training for higher standards

Commercial cleaning is key to UK healthcare’s effective and safe operation amid spirallingpatient demand. Cleaning providers that ensure rigorous workforce training for cleaning excellence within a philosophy of risk identification, informed decision-making and compliance, will be best placed to help their clients drive higher cleanliness standards, achieve better infection control and deliver safer treatments. 

Carlton Relf is managing director at Maidscando

For more information, visit www.maidscando.co.uk

Tel: 01978 437470