How to Meet the NHS Cleaning Standards for the Medical Sector

If you’re responsible for a site in the medical sector, whether owned privately or by an NHS trust, you’ll know how vital it is to keep every part of the premises clean. New cleaning standards were introduced by the NHS in 2021, so you need to be sure that your hospital or health centre is compliant with them.

The best way of ensuring that is to use a contract cleaning company that not only fully understands and embraces those standards, but also has strongly proactive systems in place to make communication clear and easy. This will mean that the contractor fully understands the precise needs of your site, so that nothing is missed.

Wixted Cleaning will provide all that and more.

Key Requirements for Meeting the New NHS Standards of Cleanliness

There are five key requirements that need to be met, in order to ensure that you’re compliant with the NHS cleaning standards:

• A range of three different types of audit — technical, efficacy and external assurance.

• A commitment to cleanliness charter, to show commitment to the standards, particularly emphasising the importance of a collaborative approach.

• A detailed and fully compliant cleaning specification, which should include cleaning elements, performance parameters and cleaning frequencies.

• Star rating certificates on public display to provide meaningful information to patients, the public and staff about the quality of cleaning being implemented.

• A responsibility framework to prevent items such as patient-related equipment from “falling through the gaps”.

How can Wixted Cleaning Help You Meet the NHS Cleaning Standards

It’s clear that, to meeting NHS cleaning standards, you need a contract cleaning company with a proven track record of successfully providing cleaning for the medical sector. Wixted Cleaning has been helping medical organisations of all types to maintain standards of cleanliness for the past 21 years.

It would be ideal, of course, if we could take every aspect of your cleaning off your hands, but unfortunately that isn’t legally possible. Though we can handle most of the tasks, the government standards strictly specify that medical practices, health centres and hospitals must conduct their own audits. They can bring in outside experts to advise, though, when necessary, and this is a role Wixted Cleaning can help with.

Overall, we can offer you help in a wide variety of ways in keeping your premises up to the standards.

Help with Auditing

The 2021 NHS cleaning standards require three kinds of audit — technical, efficacy and external assurance. As mentioned, responsibility for these audits lies with the management of your specific site. However, we can help you.

We have our own internal monitoring system. Our Area Managers conduct frequent spot checks so that we can monitor, measure and analyse our performance. This also enables us to demonstrate continuous improvement, in compliance with ISO9001, CHAS, and ISO14001.

Needless to say, we’re always happy to share this information with you. While you’ll still need to carry out your own monitoring, our information will help you focus on any issues — not to mention allowing you to approach your audits with confidence that everything’s as it should be.

Our Cleaning Schedule

One of the specifications of the commitment to cleaning charter is that cleaning tasks should be completed consistently and with proof. While consistency of cleaning is important in any sector, the consequences of missing an area or a piece of equipment on a medical site could be severe.

This is one of many reasons why we’ll work closely with you, both before beginning the contract and on an ongoing basis. Before anything is put in place, we’ll visit the site and discuss with you what particular needs there might be, and then adjust our schedules to meet those needs.

We also have a Client Care System in place. Among other purposes, this is to ensure clear and easy ongoing communications, by means of a communication book and client liaison card. This means that you can supply us with immediate notification of any change, allowing us to build it into our schedule right away.

Our Expertise in the Medical Sector

The medical sector has always been one of the areas Wixted Cleaning has specialised in, so we’re very familiar with the general requirements. Our cleaners need to be even more vigilant than usual when working on a medical site, and we have policies and procedures in place that ensure our managers can constantly check that cleaners are living up to this.

For example, cleaners are trained to understand the importance of avoiding cross-contamination and the safe disposal of hazardous waste. At the same time, our process makes sure that any special requirement for your site is incorporated into our procedures and training.

Wixted Cleaning is the Answer to Your Requirements

Cleaning a medical sector premises, whether NHS or private, is a specialised procedure and need a contract cleaning company that’s thoroughly familiar with the needs and challenges involved. Wixted Cleaning has been working in the medical sector for 21 years, and we know not only what to expect in general terms, but also the right questions to ask to establish your unique needs.

Get in touch with us by phone, email or contact form to find out how we can help ensure that your healthcare premise’s cleaning is fully compliant with the NHS standards.