When it comes to healthcare cleaning, sanitizing and disinfection, having poorly trained or ill prepared staff isn’t an option. If those workers don’t understand a healthcare facility’s specific needs, it can result in costly, dangerous errors.
Along with looking for experience and certifications, always ask how your cleaning partner recruits, onboards, trains and supports the workers responsible for keeping your hospitals and clinics safe.
Healthcare Cleaning Requires Specialized Recruiting and Onboarding
A healthcare cleaner’s skills are significantly different than those of someone cleaning an office. That means a cleaning company needs to understand what to look for and how to recruit staff that can handle additional responsibilities and needs.
We have dedicated recruiters in house at KleenMark, including a team focused solely on the medical field. This is essential. It allows a cleaning company to quickly ramp up and ensure they’re hiring people qualified to work in healthcare.
And, once they’re in the door the focus is on a proven onboarding process. Right out of the gate, they’re trained on relevant standards from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). This ensures they understand we’re responsible for specific standards that keep people safe and keep a healthcare facility compliant.
New healthcare cleaning technicians immediately undergo background checks, have their vaccinations verified and updated as needed, and begin to acquaint them with the essentials needed to work in a healthcare facility.
On-the-job Training: A Safe, Tiered Approach
Our medical team leaders are meticulous, having worked in the industry a combined 40-plus years. So, as you can imagine they take a thorough, safe approach to training new healthcare cleaning technicians.
During the first 1-2 months (if not longer), each person starts as a medical general cleaner. They learn the basics and prove they’re hitting our standards. During this time they’re highly supervised, with a veteran healthcare supervisor over their shoulder.
Once they’ve proven competence in all levels, they move into a role as a pre-/post-op cleaner. They learn more detailed and stringent cleaning and disinfecting standards, which allows them to handle a range of needs, from ambulatory centers to specialty clinics.
Ultimately, they reach a level of expertise to become operating room cleaners. This means they can handle any cleaning and disinfection need, from restrooms to a terminal clean.
When you’re looking for an outside cleaning partner, be sure to verify they follow a similar approach. This leads to consistent results and less turnover, both of which are essential in healthcare.
In-the-field Leadership
This is straightforward but the significance cannot be overstated. In most instances, cleaning companies have an off-site supervisor or two and then you have to go to corporate to find leadership.
That’s now how we roll and it’s not what you should settle for. Our director of medical operations is in the field – daily. He’s checking on his teams, providing support, training and auditing results. This is what it takes to run an effective healthcare cleaning program. Anything else isn’t sufficient.
Additionally, we have two medical managers and two assistant managers, as well as multiple levels of on-site and in-field supervision, overseeing each individual location.
Our expert-trained and tenured supervisors manage day-to-day operations, performance and ensure our medical teams always maintain the highest level of quality. They’re the backbone of a structure that has allowed us to be incredibly responsive and accountable when cleaning healthcare facilities.
After 20 years of cleaning healthcare facilities, we’ve found this is what it takes to do the job right. And it’s what’s key to preventing costly errors. If you’re curious or want to go into more detail about how we train our teams, send us an email any time.