Clinic cleaning

A clinic buys the same physical work as an office: floors, surfaces, toilets, waste. The difference is the guidelines the work sits under, and the time patients spend in the waiting room looking around.

What do the guidelines require of cleaning in a clinic?

Denmark’s national infection hygiene guidelines, NIR, require that each room is cleaned according to its risk, that contact points are checked after cleaning, and that the cleaning agreement is in writing. NIR is published by Statens Serum Institut and covers private clinics too: dentists, general practice, physiotherapy and chiropractic. A treatment room and a waiting room in the same building do not carry the same requirements, because the profile follows the clinic’s own risk assessment. And the order of work is settled. Cleaning first; disinfection is the exception, for spills of blood for instance.

Our part is the cleaning of the premises. The walkthrough ends in a written plan with rooms, tasks and frequencies, and we check the quality on a fixed schedule. Your hygiene plan is the starting point. Requirements for products, dosages or order of work go into the plan, and so does the dividing line, since NIR insists it must be clear what the cleaning covers and what the clinic’s own staff handle themselves.

How do you handle treatment rooms and waiting rooms differently?

Treatment rooms are cleaned to your hygiene plan with the weight on the contact points around the couch, sink and work surfaces. In the waiting room the job is to have it ready for the day’s first patient, and that’s where patients judge the clinic: the glass door, the chairs, the floor. The guidelines judge it on the treatment room.

That boundary, though, is sharp. Instruments, sterilisation and the patient-near equipment between two patients are clinical work and stay with your own staff, and clinical risk waste we do not touch. If the clinic has a sterilisation room, special requirements apply to the floor; no sweeping or vacuuming in there, and method requirements of that kind go into the plan along with everything else.

When and how does it work in practice?

We come outside consultation hours, early morning or after the last patient. A round in the middle of the day can be added on top.

The person who comes is briefed on the routines and the rooms that are off limits before the first visit, and works around records, screens and papers on the desks. Keys or alarm codes are handed over against a written receipt and stored separately from the address. During holidays and sickness a colleague briefed on the same plan covers.