Hospital cleaning services: a twenty-four-hour building where cleaning is an infection control function

What the companies publish

What a hospital specification has to carry

1. Zone the building by infection risk, not by floor. Theatres, isolation rooms, wards, outpatient areas, offices and public circulation are different risk categories with different methods, different frequencies and often different staff. A specification organised by floor rather than by risk category is organised the wrong way and will be rebuilt at mobilisation.
2. Separate routine cleaning from terminal cleaning. A terminal clean after a discharge or an isolation case is a defined clinical procedure with a sequence and a sign-off, not a deeper version of the daily round. It needs its own specification, its own trained staff and its own response time, and it is the line that matters most when it is needed.
3. Write the audit regime in, because it is how the standard survives. Hospital cleaning is audited rather than inspected: scored, recorded and trended, usually against a national framework. Naming the framework, the frequency and who holds the score is what keeps the specification real twelve months after it was signed.
4. Decide the boundary with clinical staff surface by surface. Equipment, bed rails, monitors and anything a patient is attached to are usually cleaned by clinical staff to a clinical protocol. The cleaning contract takes the room and the fabric. Every surface should sit on one side of that line in writing, because an unassigned surface is an uncleaned one.
5. Staff it for twenty-four hours and for surge. The building does not close, and demand is not flat: a busy night in an emergency department generates cleaning that no schedule anticipated. Both the round-the-clock presence and the surge response belong in the contract rather than in goodwill.

Common questions

Do the published commercial rates apply to a hospital?

No. Every per-square-foot figure in this record was published as a commercial or office cleaning rate by the company publishing it. A hospital is staffed continuously and specified by infection risk, and its cost is built from establishment rather than from area.

Is hospital cleaning usually outsourced?

Both models are common and the specification matters more than the model. What distinguishes a working arrangement is whether the audit regime and the terminal-clean procedure are written down, not who employs the staff.

What is a terminal clean?

A defined decontamination of a room and its fabric after a discharge or an isolation case, performed to a protocol with a sign-off. It is a clinical procedure that cleaning staff carry out, not an intensive version of the daily clean.

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