TRAINING & EDUCATION
Healthcare facilities need dedicated trainers. These trainers should be also responsible for quality control and retraining employees as necessary.
pilot project that redefined those formerly disposable workers as critical partners in patient protection. Janitors, they realised, know better than anyone else which rails are touched most frequently and which handles are hardest to clean. The Langone “clean team” paired janitors with infection control specialists and nurses in five acute care units to ensure that all high-touch surfaces were thoroughly sanitised. In its first six months the project scored so high on key measures — reducing the occurrence of C. diff infections and the consumption of last-resort antibiotics — that the hospital's administration agreed to make the experiment routine procedure throughout the facility. It now employs enough clean teams to assign them to every acute care bed in the hospital.
So what does all this tell us? It’s clear that ensuring surfaces are cleaned effectively is a key component in reducing the risks of exposure to harmful germs and to break the chain of infection. Monitoring the operational processes associated with environmental cleaning services, and properly training and managing the staff charged with these duties, are additional elements necessary for preventing transmission of HAIs (Hospital Acquired Infections).
Strategies for assessing compliance may include use of checklists, direct observation (open or covert), and surveys of personnel and patients. Process evaluation and improvement should also consider important human factors and logistical concerns that interact with environmental cleaning procedures, including workflow, staffing, training and supervision, collaboration between support
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services and clinical staff, institutional leadership, and patient preferences.
Cleaning professionals cannot be competent if the training programme is lacking. Most training is delegated to supervisors; this method has its shortcomings. Read an accurate job description of a supervisor in a 50-plus-bed hospital and you will see there is little time available for training staff, especially new employees. Training a new employee properly is a full-time job for at least two weeks, tapering off from there. It is also inadequate to have other frontline employees train the new hire. A new employee should learn tasks in a logical sequence, and not be exposed to the jumble of duties that an experienced cleaning professional faces in an average day. The learning should be logical and progressive, allowing the new employee to absorb and retain the many new things they need to know to protect the patients and themselves.
In short, healthcare facilities need dedicated trainers. These trainers should be also responsible for quality control and retraining employees as necessary. Full-time trainers can also implement a logical programme that teaches each employee the steps needed to properly clean each type of healthcare setting; patient rooms, intensive care units, labour and delivery, common areas, procedure areas, administrative areas, and so on. Awards and pins could be given for each skill set learned, creating pride and a higher level of competence, which would stop more infections.
There are many opportunities to reduce the spread of infection; training is the logical place to start.
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