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.
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.