CLEANING & HYGIENE
Good training is vital if care home cleaners are able to fully understand the importance of proper cleaning and hygiene protocols. Research from Essity reveals that 58% of cleaning staff members in care homes say they find it challenging to follow all the required steps and tasks in cleaning guidelines. And 68% of employees claim they would like to receive better and more interactive training in hand hygiene.
Free from Essity is Tork Cleaning Training for Long Term Care Homes, an online module that creates a series of ‘real world’ scenarios for care home staff. It takes a step-by-step approach and guides them through the correct processes when cleaning. The training has been developed in collaboration with the Association for Healthcare Environment and can be customised to fit with local cleaning guidelines.
Care home cleaners also need to be equipped with the right products and systems to help them carry out cleaning easily and effectively. The use of colour coded systems can be a great
help because these enable cleaning to be carried out more methodically and keep the residents safe. For example, Tork Coloured Long-Lasting Cleaning Cloths allow operatives to use a different colour cloth for each area of the care home, helping to prevent the issue of cross-contamination between, say, the kitchens and the bathrooms.
A check-list is an invaluable aid to a care home cleaner as it will ensure that every task has been fulfilled and that no chore is unnecessarily repeated. However, keeping paper records can be time-consuming and inefficient while physical checklists could easily be lost or discarded.
“High levels of seasonal flu and norovirus were reported in UK care homes this winter, while several incidents of
scabies – a highly contagious skin condition – also occurred.”
A digital record is therefore a good solution since it will facilitate record-keeping. Tork Vision Cleaning has a checklist function that allows the cleaner to tick off each task. Once a task is confirmed to have been completed this data is made visible to other team members and supervisors. This helps to ensure that no job is neglected or unnecessarily repeated.
Tork Vision Cleaning also creates a heatmap of all rooms and areas so that cleaners can check which ones are being used most frequently. This alerts them to situations in which an extra clean might be required and enables operatives to map out their daily cleaning routes more efficiently. And the system also allows staff members to check the refill status of soap and paper dispensers via a smartphone or tablet, enabling them to ensure that no dispensers run out of essential hygiene supplies.
Care home cleaners need to understand the importance of hand hygiene in order avoid spreading germs from one area to the next. Essity also offers a training module on hand hygiene in care homes.
Tork Clean Hands Training for Long Term Care Homes equips staff members with the day-to-day skills they require to secure hand hygiene. It has been developed with leading hygiene experts using the WHO My Four Moments for Hand Hygiene in a residential home environment. And the interactive simulation – which has been designed to make hand hygiene learning more inspiring – is available both online and in a virtual reality format.
Thorough cleaning is essential in a care home because it breaks the chain of infection and removes the dust, dirt and organic matter in which germs live and breed. Regular cleaning and vacuuming can significantly reduce the volume of micro-organisms.
Ensuring that no critical cleaning point is overlooked in the care home can be a hard task for the cleaner. But it can be achieved by taking a methodological approach, providing effective training and offering staff members the right products to be able to carry out an effective clean.
www.torkglobal.com 19
www.tomorrowscare.co.uk
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