National Standards for Healthcare Cleanliness 2021

6-May-2021

The National Standards for Healthcare Cleanliness 2021 were released on 26 April. These standards apply to all healthcare environments and replace previous National Specifications for Cleanliness in the NHS and the Cleaning PAS standard

Depending on the type of services provided, organisations have up to 18 months to transfer over to the new standards.

What do the new standards include?

The National Standards for Healthcare Cleanliness 2021 aim to provide all healthcare organisations with a way to measure their performance. They provide an opportunity for NHS managers to benchmark themselves against similar healthcare environments.

The standards seek to drive improvements while being flexible enough to meet the different and complex requirements of all healthcare organisations.

Making cleaning audits digital

Since the later end of 2019, Asckey has been actively involved with NHS Improvements to help with the testing of the pilot for these new standards.

Within the new standards, it highlights how useful digital auditing systems are. Making cleaning audits digital provides users with the opportunity to identify trends and hot spots. It also offers greater transparency and a more effective way to share the data within an organisation.

The standards list considerations when choosing a digital audit tool, which includes:

• ease of use;
• ability to meet the needs of the facility; one size does not fit all;
• ability to produce metrics from elements, frequency, and room data to show compliance with the standard;
• ability to ‘build as you go’ to easily capture room function changes, new rooms, etc.
• ability to easily build from plans;
• ability to easily export data with simplified reporting functionality;
• compatibility with NHS building regulation data.

At Asckey, we are proud to say that our cleaning audit software, fmfirst Cleaning, does all of the above and more! As we have been involved with the development of the standards from the beginning, we have been preparing our software to allow for this update.

So, any new clients can be reassured that our cleaning audit software will allow you to meet and evidence compliance with the new standards.<.p>

I already have fmfirst Cleaning, so what do I need to do?

Nothing. Asckey will contact existing clients to agree a date and time for an update of their existing application.

If you would like to discuss the software more, then please contact us.

Companies

• Asckey Data Services