contractor success Saving Lives – One Clean Surface At A Time Adopting a checklist mentality and stressing the importance of process improvement makes for cleaner, healthier spaces. By: Scott Rice A As a society, we celebrate the hard work and medical expertise of doctors, nurses and healthcare specialists, and we vener-ate the world-class hospitals and medical facilities that deliver that care. Rightly so: These men and women save lives every day. What we often overlook, however, is that there are others working in the same facili-ties who save lives — thousands of lives — every year. I’m not talking about emergency room surgeons or neonatal nurses, but custodial and facilities management professionals: Unsung heroes who clean restrooms, dis-infect equipment and keep infrastructure clean, safe and sanitary. And, it’s not just in healthcare facilities — people in schools, office buildings and manufacturing facilities all benefit from a properly maintained workspace. In this field, there are always opportuni-ties to get better. Just think about it: If our industry can cre-ate better processes and engage our teams to make a facility just five percent cleaner, then we can prevent thousands of infections each year and avoid preventable deaths. An article in the New York Times last year pointed out that healthcare-associated in-fections (HAIs) have a staggering price tag, costing the American healthcare system between $30 and $40 billion annually. Moreover, the cost in human suffering and human lives is incalculable. While the numbers are sobering, it is exciting to think about the progress that can be made with a focus on effective and efficient process improvement. Promoting Continual Improvement A fascinating book entitled The Checklist Manifesto offers up some exciting ideas about a very practical and achievable way to make that progress. The author, Atul Gawande — a doctor himself — explores the power and poten-tial of a very simple and “old school” tool: The checklist. The basic premise is that a simple checklist can be an incredibly important professional asset, reducing errors and improving performance across a range of industries and applications. As the book points out, while highly skilled professionals in some complex professions already routinely use check-lists to great effect, there are a number of industries where this simple-but-effective strategy is missing. It would seem that there are valuable op-portunities here to make big strides in effi-ciency and productivity by conscientiously applying a checklist-based approach. With respect to the cleanliness and sanitation of hospitals and medical facili-ties, greater efficiency and productivity translates to cleaner, safer environments and fewer avoidable infections. Educational facilities are another ex-ample of the kinds of places where a more rigorous and systematic approach to pro-cess improvement and refinement can have a dramatic impact on health outcomes. Kids are germ incubators, and their habits of touching their mouths, faces and other body parts makes sanitation even more important. This is particularly troubling with elemen-tary-aged children, who are more vulner-able and whose illnesses tend to have an outsized impact on schools and families. More and more kids are ending up in hospitals because of staph infections from materials and spaces such as wrestling mats and school locker rooms. This is where checklists and improved processes can make an enormous differ-ence. The big question, of course, is how: How do we, as an industry, translate and apply a checklist mentality to new and different professional arenas? What are the procedural priorities and practical implications of a back-to-basics 34 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • December 2012
CMM – Archives Dec 2012: 34
