Celebrate Clean Hospitals Day 2024: Elevating Health Care Environmental Hygiene to Safeguard Patient and Staff Safety Worldwide

Clean Hospitals Corner with Alexandra Peters, PhD

Dear Infection Control Today^® (ICT^®) readers,

Clean Hospitals Day 2024 will soon be upon us! Every year since 2020, the 20th of October has been the designated day for celebrating environmental service workers and management and raising awareness of environmental hygiene in health care facilities worldwide. Clean Hospitals Day coincides with the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology’s (APIC’s) International Infection Prevention Week, and we are proud to partner with them for these significant events. This partnership strengthens our cause and makes us part of a global movement for health care environmental hygiene.

Each year, Clean Hospitals Day focuses on a different theme. This year, we delve into “The 6 Technical Domains of Healthcare Environmental Hygiene.” These domains, including surfaces, air control, water control, device reprocessing and sterilization, laundry, and waste management, are not just crucial, but they are the backbone for maintaining a safe and clean healthcare environment.

As ICT is already publishing an article about Clean Hospitals Day and all the materials available to health care facilities, it's beneficial to provide a detailed understanding of these 6 domains.

It's essential to remember that health care environmental hygiene encompasses both human and technical elements. Both are vital for a robust environmental hygiene program, and neither should be undervalued.

That said, if we look at the WHO Multimodal Improvement Strategy (MMIS), which is based on the WHO Global Surveys on hand hygiene, almost all the strategy's pillars deal with human elements rather than technical ones.

The MMIS comprises 5 pillars and has been adopted as an implementation strategy for environmental hygiene, especially with the development of the Healthcare Environmental Hygiene Self-Assessment Framework (HEHSAF). Although other implementation strategies are available, this one has benefited IPC for 2 reasons. First, it is comparatively simple, and second, it has been used in thousands of hospitals worldwide for hand hygiene. Seeing how low the global adherence to environmental hygiene is across resource levels, second, it makes the most sense to approach it in the simplest, most effective way possible.

The 1st in the MMIS element is system change, which focuses on the availability of the necessary products, supplies, and infrastructure to perform environmental hygiene. The second is the training and education needed for a workforce that can perform well and know how their work is essential for patient safety. The third is monitoring and feedback. You can't improve what you can't monitor, and feedback, especially constructive feedback, is critical for staff to adapt to changing environments and improve their behaviors and processes. The 4th is workplace reminders, which include any visible materials concerning safety practices, awareness, education, or any activities or celebrations in healthcare facilities. The 5th is institutional safety climate, which encompasses all qualitative elements of working somewhere. Staff motivation, career advancement, communication, and the team are key elements of a healthcare facility's safety climate. Only the very first element of the MMIS concerns the technical elements of environmental hygiene, so why focus on only this?

As we know, health care environmental hygiene is a relatively new field, and its scope has yet to be widely defined. Therefore, delineating the technical domains is essential as a first step and a precursor to analyzing how best to allocate and integrate a workforce in those areas. Of course, each of these domains is a whole field in and of itself… so there is more to come.

I look forward to celebrating Clean Hospitals Day with all of you, a dedicated to recognizing the efforts of environmental service workers and management and raising awareness of environmental hygiene in health care facilities worldwide. I hope you’ll find the toolkit useful for your facilities and inspire you to contribute to our shared goal of a clean and safe health care environment!

Feel free to email me at Alexandra.peters@unige.ch.