Healthcare associated infections can pose a serious risk to patients, staff, and visitors. They can incur significant costs and cause high rates of morbidity to those infected. So, how can you create a clean and safe space for your patients and staff?
Around 834,000 patients a year will acquire a preventable infection in an NHS Hospital in England, costing around £2.7 billion including specialised care1. As a result, infection prevention and infection control practices must be a key priority in all healthcare facilities to keep infection rates low. Operating a clean and safe environment is essential to promote health and confidence for patients, the public and staff.
Infection prevention and control has been a high priority in England for the last 20 years. During this time since mandatory surveillance was introduced, there has been a reduction in Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections and cases of Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infection.
However, it is important not to become complacent. Other Healthcare Associated Infections (HCAIs) are growing in incidence. New infections, including the growing number of more resistant strains of bacteria, are in danger of spreading.
In hospital, infections can be acquired from person to person contact or from contaminated equipment, devices and environments. In a healthcare setting, air, water, medical devices and dry surfaces are all potential sources of contamination and infection.
Infection prevention and infection control practices in hospitals are constantly evolving. Prevalence of “superbugs,” or multi-drug resistant organisms is increasing in hospitals, and according to the recent studies, are causing around 28,500 deaths per year in England2.
On-site cleaning teams provide a highly responsive, end to end service from routine daily cleaning to periodic tasks and ad hoc or on-demand reactive services to dealing with spillages or carrying out infection cleans. This can also include planned deep-cleaning, commissioning cleans and UVC/HPV decontamination cleans which will help prevent hospital infections.
At Sodexo Health & Care we create safe care environments that support core clinical activity and help each Trust to achieve their patient safety targets through:
Maintaining a clean hospital is not the job of the cleaning team alone. Consistent environmental infection prevention programmes, hand hygiene and employee competency training are some of the most effective ways to combat these infections alongside the capacity to isolate patients and assuring optimal antibiotic prescribing.
Below are three critical areas to consider when thinking about your organisations approach to environmental infection prevention.
It’s important that all cleaning team members undertake regular, comprehensive training to embed the correct processes and behaviours around IPC. At Sodexo Health & Care, we deliver a consistent cleaning service that follows a robust operating framework and uses the latest clinically proven infection prevention and control techniques.
Training covers cleaning standard operating procedures such as chemical safety and COSHH, colour coding, using new equipment correctly and managing laundry stock and emergency stock.
We continually benchmark our cleaning performance against national standards. Developed by our Subject Matter Experts, using national and global expertise, our healthcare cleaning tool kit provides the tools to operate a successful domestic cleaning service in a healthcare environment. It defines what we do, how we do it, how we train and how we communicate. Here are some examples of the work that we include as part of our toolkit;
We continually review and modify our products and processes to help increase patient safety, reduce infections and improve productivity, increase efficiency and deliver value for money:
The time to act is now, so you can stay ahead of both the short-term and long-term developments in managing HCAIs effectively.