Hospital Cleaning and Infection Control -The Collaboration between Hospital Cleaning Outsourced Staff and Infection Control Teams-

Abstract

Outsourced staff are responsible for 86.1% of hospital cleaning in Japan, and it has become commonplace to entrust cleaning tasks to businesses.

It has become common knowledge that hospital cleaning is indispensable for controlling healthcare associated infections, although it has become abundantly clear that infection control knowledge and techniques among hospital cleaning subcontractors, who bear the brunt of this task, are inadequate. In recent years, hospital cleaning outsourced staff have frequently been unable to deal with the demands of cleaning medical facilities, which has increased stress among infection control teams (ICT). However, this is not merely a problem that affects hospital cleaning outsourced staff.

I believe that three obligations must be fulfilled in order for outsourced staff to provide adequate hospital cleaning services. The first is that the ICT should be included proactively when the contract is drawn up, the second is that outsourced staff should perform cleaning that is compliant with the specifications in the contract, and lastly, the ICT bears the responsibility to perform inspections and give feedback. In this way, the role of ICT is great. If you want to improve the quality of cleaning at your own facility, you should perform internal reviews.