Insight

2020 brought heightened awareness and scrutiny for how we keep our spaces clean, particularly in healthcare settings. But the importance of preventing the spread of germs on surfaces has been a priority for Gillette Children’s since before COVID-19. Gillette Children’s is a specialty healthcare centre focused on children with disabilities and complex medical needs in Minnesota. The hospital wanted to identify opportunities to adjust their patient room cleaning practices to increase environmental cleaning compliance and help decrease healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), which can be contracted by patients coming into contact with unclean hands or surfaces while receiving medical treatment. This would help ensure patient rooms are consistently cleaned.

Innovation

Ecolab partnered with Gillette Children’s to implement its Ecolab Patient Room Programme, which helps ensure patient rooms are consistently cleaned.

The programme uses OxyCide™ Daily Disinfectant Cleaner with sporicidal activity to clean and disinfect high-touch surfaces like sinks and tabletops in combination with Ecolab's patented DAZO^® Fluorescent Marking Gel and UV flashlight to quickly and objectively measure how thoroughly surfaces have been cleaned. Importantly, because OxyCide disinfects and cleans surfaces simultaneously, Gillette Children’s was able to streamline their cleaning procedures, saving staff time and labour costs while continuing to reduce potential exposure to HAIs.

The programme also features dashboards to track and share DAZO^® room cleanliness results and identify actionable opportunities for additional hands-on training with a dedicated local account executive to assist with hospital implementation and training, monitor progress and analyse performance metrics to help ensure programme success down to a department, team, individual or object level.

Impact

The Patient Room Programme helped establish a clear and sustained relationship between increased monitoring, feedback and training and help decreased incidence of HAIs. Gillette Children’s saw high-touch surface cleaning compliance increase from 37% to 90% and saw a 65% decrease in HAIs in the same three-year period, helping drive productivity by increasing patient bed turnover and most importantly keeping children safe during their stay.