Independent audit of environmental cleaning is considered one of the cornerstones of effective infection prevention and control practice.
Research tells us that SELF-AUDITING has three significant problems:
- Self-auditing frequently results in spurious results almost 100% of the time.1
- The fictional data self-auditing generates, not only misrepresents the true situation, it also wastes valuable resources, costs money and is detrimental to customer care.1
- Instead of driving quality improvement process, self-auditing frequently deteriorates into a routine ‘monitoring tool’ that derails quality improvement outputs.2
Services
Sanifield is happy to provide advice regarding processes for audit and measure, quality improvement methodologies, review accreditation requirements, and project management of environmental cleaning and IPC initiatives.
To ensure the quality output from your environmental cleaning and sanitisation operations, the cleaning policies, procedures and practice should be reviewed and updated regularly.
Whilst our auditing consultative service closely reflects industry and government guidelines and recommendations, we take the next step by tailoring systems for review, audit and monitoring that are unique to your business and commercial requirements.
- Development and deployment of audit checklists
- Conducting audits
- Guidance on frequency of audits and audit requirements
- Feedback, on-boarding, and engagement of cleaning/sanitisation staff post-audit
- Updating cleaning policies and procedures
References
1: Wilson J. Rethinking the use of audit to drive improvement. Journal of Infection Prevention. 2018;19(1):3-4. doi:10.1177/1757177417746732
2: National Institute for Clinical Excellence. (2002) Principles for best practice in clinical audit. London: NICE. Available at: https://www.nice.org.uk/media/default/About/what-we-do/Into-practice/principles-forbest-practice-in-clinical-audit.pdf.
