Fostering Collaboration Between Infection Prevention and Environmental Services

While HCWs may better understand the need for thorough cleaning and disinfection of inanimate surfaces coupled with other evidence-based practices such as hand hygiene, it does not ensure that the decontamination process may actually occur. One source of contention in healthcare facilities is to whom the responsibility of cleaning patient-care equipment falls — nursing or housekeeping? And while each side debates the issue, the cleaning doesn’t get done.

“Cleaning is everyone’s responsibility,” Roye-Horn emphasizes. “I started speaking to the problem of both groups not cleaning a few years ago, and when I first included this topic in our annual infection control meetings, some of our healthcare professionals were upset. They would say to me, ‘Cleaning is not part of my job.’ It requires a major culture change; whether or not an organization can make such a change says something about how they respond to problems in general and how they are able to change behaviors leading to unsafe practices. After about three years of a great deal of resistance at my facility on the part of HCWs who insisted that it was not part of their job, we now have HCWs who realize that cleaning is so much a part of their job that they will say to another practitioner, ‘Don’t forget to wipe that after use.’ It’s a constant education, as we get new HCWs fresh out of school who haven’t had infection control as part of their education, or people from other facilities where it isn’t so much the norm. Now, HCWs understand that if they are the last user of something like a wheelchair, that they are the ones responsible for cleaning it. It’s not as if we are asking them to clean the floor.”