A busy start
Neil Spencer-Cook, Chief Operating Officer of the British Institute of Cleaning Science (BICSc), gives us an update on the goings on at the Institute.
It has been an interesting start to the year at BICSc: we are working on the review of our Cleaning Professional's Skills Suite (CPSS), and the mobile/ tablet application that will run in line with the changes and make life easier for all the Assessors out there able to use it.
This review saw us consider
how the cleaning operative works today, and we also consulted with a
few of our Accredited Training Members to ensure we took on board current thinking and operational best practice.
The suite of skills can be used more efficiently by including functionality within the application to roll the assessment skills together. The introduction of the application will also mean that all the previous paperwork required for submission is removed, as this will be done automatically.
The new version of CPSS should be available to all of our Accredited Training Members in April/May 2020, along with the application which will be free to use for all Assessors.
CPSS will continue to grow in the future as we add Sector Specific Skills Units, including the Domestic Cleaning sector, which is a sector that has been crying out for training in recent years.
On another note, with the current outbreak of the Coronavirus (or COVID-19) we are getting a lot of members asking for advice.
It’s always difficult to provide accurate guidance at the start of an outbreak as the exact effects and implications will be unknown. We quickly updated our website to share the advice of the World Health Organisation and Public Health England, and we are now able to offer our members some advice on what cleaning operatives can do to help prevent the spread of the infection.
The virus, believed to be from the same strain as the SARS virus, has presented itself as a respiratory illness with varying levels of severity from minor symptoms to death. As with any virus, the spread can be rapid with person to person contact enabling it to spread at pace. Any form of infection is created by exposure to harmful micro-organisms such as bacteria, fungi, viruses and internal parasites.
Standard precautionary measures need to be applied in order to help prevent the risk of spreading any infection. Not all infections are possible to identify straight away, and how any infection is spread may not be known in the early stages of an outbreak. We can help and contribute to the
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Having attended an Infection Control and Prevention conference hosted by Knowlex in February, it was apparent then that there wasn’t a clear consensus at that point on what measures were needed to prevent and control the outbreak. Here we are just weeks later, and schools have been closed, media coverage, panic buying, and stockpiling are at an unprecedented level.
We are all looking for the end of this terrible situation, but for now, the best we can do is look after our workforce, adapt, pull together and get through this as best we can.
At the time of writing the common theme seems to be personal hygiene and self-quarantine are key to the prevention of the spread of the outbreak.
prevention and reduce the risk by applying good standard precautionary practices.
The Institute is always keen to give the best advice we can to the industry. However, we must also exercise caution with an outbreak like this to ensure that the advice we are giving is effective, as there have been many views out there. Hence, it is always imperative that we didn't rush into things.
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