Suzanne Callander provides an insight into a quick and simple test that can help reduce healthcare-associated infection rates by ensuring that cleaning protocols are adhered to.
Cleaning is a fundamental principle of infection prevention and control in the healthcare environment. Maintaining a clean environment can help to ensure patient safety as well as making financial sense for hospitals. Healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) can develop either as a direct result of a healthcare intervention, such as medical or surgical treatment, or from simply being in contact with a healthcare setting. HCAIs pose a serious risk to patients, staff and visitors, and can also result in significant avoidable costs for the NHS. Treating a single HCAI can cost the NHS anywhere between £4,000 and £10,000.
Ensuring that cleaning and decontamination protocols are adhered to can, therefore, increase patient safety and offer cost-savings for the NHS. Despite this fact being well documented, cleaning is often still treated as a burdensome and costly task and the measurement of decontamination and cleaning effectiveness is still not a mandatory NHS requirement.
The National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) has recognised the fact that the NHS continues to place reliance on visual assessment of surface cleanness, despite this being a subjective method and it has stated that ‘reliance on observational evidence of cleaning efficacy may be of questionable validity’.
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