CLEANING & HYGIENE


The Care Home Cleaning Conundrum


Care home cleaners have their work cut out to create a clean and germ-free environment. How do they achieve this in the most efficient and effective way possible? Liam Mynes from Tork manufacturer Essity tackles this thorny issue.


A care home cleaner’s work is never done. Operatives are required to carry out a long list of tasks on a daily basis to ensure that the environment remains clean and hygienic for residents.


Daily tasks include cleaning floors, vacuuming carpets and cleaning mirrors and tiles. However, other tasks such as cleaning the toilets, sanitising surfaces, replenishing washroom dispensers and wiping down frequent touchpoints need to be performed at least twice a day to avoid cross-contamination.


Despite being faced with a long list of jobs every day, cleaners are obliged to perform their roles quickly, efficiently and thoroughly to ensure that no essential task falls through the cracks. So, how can they achieve this?


A check-list that allows workers to tick off each job once it has been completed will ensure that every task has been fulfilled and that no chore is repeated unnecessarily. But keeping paper records can be time-consuming and inefficient, while physical checklists could easily be lost or discarded.


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. And 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 when an extra clean might be required and enables operatives to map out their daily cleaning routes more efficiently.


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.


Providing user-friendly products that maximise hygiene and efficiency also helps cleaners to carry out their jobs more effectively. For example, Tork Microfibre Reusable Cleaning Cloths quickly pick up and retain any particles on the cleaning surface, while Tork Microfibre Disposable Cleaning Cloths are a convenient medium for cleaning critical areas because they are thrown away aſter use.


Good training is vital to ensure that care home staff and cleaners understand the importance of proper cleaning and hygiene. Research from Essity reveals that 58% of cleaning staff in care homes say they find it challenging to follow all the required steps


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and tasks in cleaning guidelines. And 68% of employees claim they would like to receive better and more interactive training in hand hygiene.


Essity offers two free online training solutions for care home staff. Tork Cleaning Training for Long Term Care Homes provides employees with ‘real world’ cleaning scenarios in a safe virtual world. The training has been developed in collaboration with the Association for Healthcare Environment and can be customised to fit with local cleaning guidelines.


The second module, Tork Clean Hands Training for Long Term Care Homes, equips staff members with the day-to-day skills they require to secure hand hygiene at every moment. 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.


Staying on top of care home cleaning in an age when staff shortages continue to bite can be no mean feat. But it can be achieved with the aid of smart systems, effective training and the right products.


www.tork.co.uk/longtermcare www.tomorrowscare.co.uk


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