Clean Hospitals Day 2026: How to Empower Environmental Services Staff

Environmental services (EVS) professionals help protect patients every day, but do they have the support and recognition they need to do that work well? For Clean Hospitals President Alexandra Peters, PhD, that question is central to this year’s Clean Hospitals Day theme of empowerment. In this conversation with Infection Control Today^® (ICT^®), Peters discusses why EVS staff must be recognized as health care workers and how hospitals can give them a stronger voice in patient care. She also explains why meaningful improvements in environmental hygiene can begin with basic resources and well-trained people.

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Repetitions and verbal fillers have been removed.

ICT: How did Clean Hospitals Day come to be?

Alexandra Peters, PhD: We started in 2020. Basically, we modeled Clean Hospitals Day after World Hand Hygiene Day because Professor Didier Pittet [MD, MS, CBE, a renowned epidemiologist], who founded Clean Hospitals, had extensive experience with global infection prevention campaigns and led the WHO hand hygiene campaign. It was only natural that when we were trying to do the same work in environmental hygiene that he’d done in hand hygiene, we would also organize a Clean Hospitals Day.

We started during COVID-19 in 2020, and the first theme was environmental hygiene and COVID-19. Every year, it’s been growing bigger, and we’ve been getting more and more people involved. It’s really a pleasure to see how excited people get and how much they get involved.

ICT: It truly is a global initiative. Today, I’ve watched people from hospitals all over the world posting on LinkedIn. What is the most important message Clean Hospitals would like to share?

AP: If I distill it into just a few sentences, the first thing is that the health care environment is extremely important for patient safety. You can get infections through the health care environment. In fact, many of the health care-associated infections that people get are from the health care environment.

The second thing is that EVS workers, or the people who clean, are health care workers. They should be trained like health care workers. They should be treated like health care workers.

The third would be that you can do a lot with a little. I know that everybody is strapped for funds. Hospitals are very dynamic places with many competing priorities and stress, and many things are time-dependent. You need to get things right, get the room turned over, and make room for the next patient. Of course, that’s a setting that’s very challenging in many ways. But the basics of health care environmental hygiene don’t require all the fancy equipment. You can really do it mostly with very basic supplies and well-trained people.

ICT: You and I have talked in the past about how little some hospitals have available for cleaning.

AP: One rag for the day and a bucket of bleach, and then you’re supposed to make people safe. That’s really tough. There are some health care facilities that just do not have more than that.

But then there’s probably a majority of health care facilities that could invest a little bit more money in environmental hygiene if they realized how much money they were losing through transmission of health care-associated infections. We know that infection prevention is a good business decision. We know there’s a strong return on investment in infection prevention.

It’s about hospitals considering the value of that investment, not just the money you put into a new device, training people, additional disinfection, or changing your products. You have to look further than that.

ICT: This year’s theme is empowerment. What does empowering environmental services staff look like during an ordinary shift, and how can leaders tell whether staff feel comfortable raising concerns?

AP: First of all, it’s important to note that they’re some of the least empowered, if not the least empowered, workers in a hospital. It looks like giving them the information and resources they need to do their job well. Giving them autonomy to manage their own time because you’ve made them professionals and giving them enough time to do the work correctly. Recognizing what they do correctly and, when there are issues, addressing them in a constructive way and making sure they have a voice.

Very often, they can be your eyes and ears in the wards. They know when something’s not working right, and they need to be empowered to communicate that up the hierarchy. The more we can integrate environmental services into the clinical care teams, the more they’ll be able to voice their concerns and speak to their colleagues.

ICT: Where do you see the greatest opportunities for EVS teams and infection preventionists to learn from each other and improve everyday practices?

AP: I think the greatest opportunities come when we think about accountability. It’s easy to say, “We’re going to outsource all our cleaning staff, and now there’s a company that should be held accountable for mistakes or infections.” The company is very often policing itself, and I don’t think that’s the right way to think about accountability as a hospital manager.

I think the biggest opportunity we have is for hospitals to say, “Let’s get infection prevention and control involved with environmental hygiene services. It’s fine to outsource, but let’s make sure that monitoring is in-house. Let’s make sure they use the products that the hospital decided were the right ones to use for environmental hygiene. Let’s make sure everyone’s trained to the hospital standards.” Those things may cost a little bit more, but in the end, they save a lot of money.

ICT: What commitment would you like every hospital to make on Clean Hospitals Day, and what would meaningful progress look like by Clean Hospitals Day 2027?

AP: A commitment every hospital can make is that, at the very least, their staff should be trained. They should be present on the hospital organizational chart. They’re part of the health care staff. They should be there, and that would already be quite a step for many hospitals.

For hospitals that already provide training, look at when they last received training. Maybe look at whether you can provide training for specific environments. Look at how you’re monitoring, what you’re monitoring, and what kind of feedback you’re giving. Is it at the team level, or are you able to give individual feedback and really let staff know they’re being supported in their improvement?

It’s not going to happen in a year, but a few years from now, it would be great if environmental services staff had access to career development and various certifications to move into management roles.