1374Environmental Cleaning at the Cornerstone of Decreasing Healthcare Acquired Infections, Including Clostridium difficile

Woods, Kenneth L.; Mangino, Julie E.

doi:10.1093/ofid/ofu052.920

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Other studies have also shown a reduction in HAIs with enhanced cleaning and associated disinfection. [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] The limitations of our study are, in some ways, its strength. We did not attempt to control room selection or rigidly monitor participant (nursing or housekeeping) activities aside from ongoing education and regular performance feedback.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Environmental cleaning and disinfection: Sustaining changed practice and improving quality in the community hospital

Parry

Sestovic

Renz

et al. 2022

ASHE

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Objective: Short-term improvements in hospital room cleaning can readily be achieved but are difficult to maintain. This is particularly true for high-risk, “high-touch” surfaces. Therefore, we embarked on a process to sustain improvements in surface cleaning and disinfection to reduce hospital-acquired infection (HAI) rates. Interventions: Our environmental services (EVS) and infection prevention departments incorporated a formal education, monitoring, and feedback process for focused cleaning and disinfection of high-touch surfaces into their routine policies and procedures in 2011. Cleaning validation was performed by infection prevention liaison nurses using a fluorescent targeting method to evaluate the thoroughness of cleaning. Results: Surface cleaning performance on medical-surgical units in 2011 was 74.7%, but this rate incrementally increased in response to the interventions and has been sustained at >90% for the past 6 years. Similar patterns of improvement were observed in the operating room, labor and delivery, endoscopy suite and cardiac catheterization laboratory. Conversely, HAI rates, particularly C. difficile rates, decreased by 75% and surgical site infection rates decreased by 55%. Conclusions: EVS training, monitoring, and feedback interventions, instituted 10 years ago have enhanced our environmental cleaning and disinfection efforts in multiple areas of the hospital and have been sustained to the present. Although other concurrent initiatives to reduce infection rates also existed, the improvements in environmental cleaning were associated with dramatic reductions in HAI rates over the 10-year period.

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