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by HEPACART on Nov 30, 2016
When a patient walks into your hospital, how important is their first impression? You probably want your facility to feel welcoming, safe, and clean so you put a lot of effort into your waiting area and reception.
And what if they find their way to a wing where you are performing routine maintenance? You might be pulling cables or testing fire alarms. How does the presence of maintenance workers impact your patients’ views of your facility? The fact is that the perception of your facility can have a major impact on patient satisfaction. Even when standard operating procedures for maintenance are clean (and they always should be), they can still alter a patient’s perception of the facility. To boost patient satisfaction and expand the infection control team available to you, worker training is critical.
Maintenance workers are an essential part of any healthcare facility team, but they can influence patient perception of cleanliness and safety. Because of this influence, it is just as important that maintenance workers receive training in infection control and patient isolation as it is for healthcare staff.
Current State of Hospital Maintenance Workers
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2014, there were more than 1.3 million general maintenance jobs in the U.S. With nearly 6,000 hospitals in the country, a good portion of those workers are finding employment in the healthcare field. Unfortunately, while maintenance workers may receive training in their specific job functions, it is rarer to see them receive extensive training in infection control and patient isolation protocol.Facility maintenance teams are often understaffed, which means that training slips even lower on the priority list as more tasks need to be accomplished by fewer workers. Further, when an emphasis is placed on budget and efficiency rather than patient safety, it is easy to forget how high the stakes are when it comes to infection control and patient isolation. Ultimately, all staff at a hospital, including maintenance workers, should be prepared to contribute to patient isolation steps in case of emergency. The more training maintenance staff has the better prepared the entire team will be when a crisis arises.
Patient isolation training begins with the right tools. One critical way that facilities can ensure isolation needs are being met is by choosing the right tools for any isolation job, and training workers on the use of those tools. Isolation tools can range from anteroom isolation options to the sealing of wings where work is being performed and many different options in between.
How Anteroom Isolation Can Solve Training Pain
Hospital anterooms are portable, reusable patient isolation tools that make it easy for maintenance workers to not only do their jobs efficiently but to look professional and clean while doing it. Using an anteroom takes little to no training since the room fits snugly on hospital doorframes when wheeled into place. The addition of an HEPA-filtered negative air machine can quickly turn any room into a Class IV infection control area.
Training maintenance workers in patient isolation is still important, but with the right tools that training does not have to expend a lot of time or resources.
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