What are the best practices to prevent cross-contamination and ensure hygiene in high-touch areas?

Some of the best ways to to identify high touch areas are to look at the easiest to reach areas. Imagine the most basic areas that we all touch each day. Door knobs and light switches to counters. When you enter any facility you have to be mindful of easy to reach surfaces. First start by cleaning the surface of debris and dirt then apply disinfectant to those surfaces. Rotate your cleaning to accommodate any other area out of basic reach from baseboards to shelves or ledges. As you clean any area on a daily basis you can skip over daily those harder to reach areas and clean them weekly or monthly.

Conduct regular audit on high touch areas, to ensure effective cleaning was practiced especially by the HSK team. Not to forget about medical devices, staff should know how to clean/disinfect to prevent cross contamination

There have been many advancements in all the different types of cleaning equipment, and tools that can be used. It’s best when wiping off or cleaning a surface to use microfiber rags. As well when touching the floor, there are many microfiber products created by Rubbermaid. The benefits of using these types of products are they can clean and be able to remove up to 300 times more, dirt and debris than a regular cloth. It’s also good to know that you can launder microfiber up to 500-1000 times.

There is also a need to assess if the cleaning chemicals selected may have corrosive or noxious cross contamination risks to the areas being cleaned or via a chemical reaction.

The keys to achieving Disinfection are : 1. Removal of all visible gross soil by use of mechanical agitation ( also known as elbow grease according to grandma) from the surface. 2. The surface cleaned must remain wet for the FULL “Contact Time” listed on the product label of the product you are using.

Some of the best ways to monitor your cleaning is to create a scope of work. In the scope of work you would break down your daily activities, making sure to take into account weekly monthly, quarterly and annual services. Depending on the facility, you’ll have the opportunity to understand each and every surface and the equipment that you’re using to go through and clean and maintain. This will allow for efficiencies so that the cleaners are able to get their job done on a daily basis and also give the best impact for the customer.

In my experience, training the crew on best practices helps to keep up their motivation and team spirit but we can not forget to be there to incentive the crew and check for results. Your presence is the best way to show the crew that you care for them but you still want results.

Some of the best practices that we use is to provide a written document laminated, showing visual explanations of our best practices, and the industries has taught by ISSA, and many medical institutions for best hospital cleaning practices. We find it best to use ASHES which is training for housekeeping, staff, and use that cleaning process in all types of facilities to give a medical cleaning to a general office environment

Experience showed me that a clean place is not that one we clean but the one people don’t mess up. Educate the users on basic higiene practices (such as wash hands more often) is the best practice to avoid cross contamination in a working environment.

The best advice I’ve ever received was from my dad, he stated you can only expect which you inspect. So on a regular basis, we contact our customers both via text, phone calls emails and regular visits to monitor compliance on all of the scope of work, that was laid out for staff. Only through regular visitation and communication with her client. Are we able to dial-in the desired results both for our client and for us as a provider of services. This is an extremely important time during the first few weeks and months of a contract. At this time, able to determine if the established budget, mutually agreed-upon meets the needs of the traffic and size of the facility required cleaning services.