Healthcare Cleaning Forum 2020 : Environmental Hygiene & Cleaning during a Pandemic

Healthcare-associated infections are responsible for millions of deaths every year and affect hundreds of millions of patients. During a pandemic, the situation becomes even more dire, as attention is shifted to the emergency at hand, often at a high cost to patents and healthcare workers.
COVID-19 has tested healthcare facilities around the world. Healthcare environmental hygiene is a crucial building block in slowing this pandemic and preventing SARS CoV-2 from being spread during the delivery of healthcare. Though the pandemic has greatly increased focus on social distancing, hand hygiene and wearing masks, environmental hygiene is an oft-neglected aspect of infection prevention. It is crucial to maintain our focus on a safer healthcare environment in order to keep patients and nurses safe.

Providing patients with a safe healthcare environment is essential for their safety and well- being. This means that the healthcare environment must be appropriately cleaned and disinfected when and where needed. In order to be able to designate an area as safe, we need quality assessment methods and standards to define targets and acceptable levels of contamination or soil.
How we measure quality of disinfection has a direct impact on what we know about the safety of an area, and even the trust and relationships institutions have with their staff and healthcare workers. Post-discharge cleaning and high-touch surfaces management remain the main targets of infection control teams in their efforts to limit cross-contamination. How institutions decide to measure quality of environmental hygiene will have a direct impact on cleaning staff, healthcare workers, and patients.