CM/Spotlight: Hard Floor Care While many healthcare/long-term care facilities will likely continue to have some in-house people handling daily cleaning tasks, the larger and more involved work, such as floorcare and similar tasks, are the ones they are considering farming out to contract cleaners. For these facilities, there are many advan-tages to hiring BSCs to perform cleaning work. Among the advantages are: ■ Financial: When contracting out clean-ing services, administrators have lit-tle or no internal employment costs. For example taxes; health insurance; workers’ compensation insurance; added payroll and accounting tasks; and so on. ■ Supervision: When in-house cleaning workers handle cleaning tasks, they must be supervised. When a BSC is hired to provide these services, super-vision is the responsibility of the con-tractor. ■ Training: Training is no longer an in-house concern. With a contract service, proper training is again the responsibil-ity of the company providing the clean-ing services. ■ Equipment: Typically, the BSC will pro-vide all of the needed cleaning tools, chemicals and equipment. If cleaning work is performed by an in-house staff, the healthcare/long-term care facility will need to purchase these tools. ■ Green: Related to training, the profes-sional cleaning industry has, in many sectors, evolved into the professional “green cleaning” industry. Many con-tract services are aware of green clean-ing and understand what it is all about. Administrators at a healthcare/long-term care facility may not be as attuned to this evolution. While these are just some of the poten-tial benefits of using a contract cleaning service, healthcare/long-term care facilities must realize there may be some drawbacks to using a BSC. For instance, the potential contractor must understand that cleaning a health-care/long-term care facility is not the same as cleaning an office ... or even a school, for that matter. Both types of care facilities typically serve elderly people with more compromised im-mune systems. Further, pathogens that can cause illness may be present in a long-term care facility that are not found in many other types of facilities. What’s more, people in these facilities are more likely to have a serious accident should they fall. And floors may be more likely to have spills on them along with other debris. This is why proper floorcare is such a key consideration in healthcare/long-term care facilities. Special needs floors . Some hard-surface floors, no matter where they are located, may need more care and attention than others. While a VCT floor is relatively easy to care for, a wood or stone floor may require much more time and attention. Which floors need to be “finished.” The audit will determine which floors are to be finished and which are not. For instance, for the main entry floor men-tioned earlier, administrators may want a high-gloss shine.* For that back hallway, adding a finish may not be as necessary. Time and cost allotment. Time and cost tie in with all the other items discussed here. Floorcare can be costly. A determination should be made as to how much time and money to spend on each floor area. Very often, it is best to determine these metrics working with an astute floorcare professional or a janitorial distributor familiar with floorcare issues. What Proper Floorcare Looks Like Just as these locations differ from other types of facilities, so do their floorcare needs. Most healthcare/long-term care facilities will have a mixture of carpets and hard-sur-face flooring. While there are no exact figures, the trend in recent years has been to install hard-surface floors such as vinyl composite tiles (VCT) and similar floors. The main reason, among others, is that if spills occur on these floors, they can easily be cleaned up. This is not necessarily the case with car-pet, so more facilities have been steering away from carpeted flooring. Working with administrators, the first step healthcare facilities should take in creating a proper floorcare program is to do a floor-care audit. This should be performed whether hiring an outside vendor, BSC or turning floorcare tasks over to in-house crews. View the floorcare program as the “play-book” on how you want floors to be cared for and the floorcare audit as the foundation for the playbook. The audit should look into the following. The use of each floor. A floor in a main entry is likely more im-portant than a back hallway used just by staff. Because of this, the entry is apt to need more cleaning, care and attention. April 2014 Putting The Audit Into Action With the audit completed, the next steps in-clude determining the frequency of floorcare tasks, by whom, when, and if implement-ing a green floorcare strategy, what tools, chemicals and equipment are required. Frequency of services would include such things as how often floors are dust mopped, or a healthier and faster alternative, using a vacuum with HEPA cartridge for improved filtration. This would also include floor mopping, floor scrubbing using an automatic scrub-ber, and stripping and refinishing the floors. The frequency of each task performed can vary depending on the findings of the audit. The next issue to consider is when the work is to be performed. The majority of lighter floorcare duties, such as vacuuming, can often be per-formed while staff and patients/residents are present. Some recently introduced vacuums are exceptionally quiet and should not cause a disturbance. 34 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ®
CMM – Archives April 2014: 34
