How to Define the Perfect Cleaning for Health Program

By Malcolm Smith

Cleaning for Health. Many people talk about it, but few people know specifically what it means. Let’s start by defining “health”.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

However, is a goal of complete health practical? The answer depends on how you define it, and for the sake of discussion, instead of “complete”, let’s use the word “perfect” and apply it to a hammer: 
The perfect hammer for building a doll house might be one with a five-ounce ball peen head and short wooden handle, while the perfect carpenter’s hammer might have a 16-ounce claw-steel head, long fiberglass handle for swinging, rubberized grip and finger placements.

Perfection and completeness relate to purpose. Similarly, a perfect or complete CFH program relates to its purpose.

While there are few absolutes in health, there are helpful metrics. If your doctor says: “Your A1C, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, BMI and other metrics show improvement.” You know that you’re on track with respect to those targets — recognizing these depend on the factors measured and are unique to your body not someone else’s.

In the cleaning field, it’s similar with our proposed body-of-work for individual customers.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming said that he would not know how to clean a table unless he knew the purpose of the table, citing the difference between cleaning a surgical table versus cleaning a table in a restaurant. The metrics that matter depend on the application.

The "perfect" cleaning for health program in this context is one that meets the spec, ethical priorities — e.g., protecting workers from harmful exposures — and offers metrics that are meaningful to customers such as lower overall costs due to better processes.

In this sense, cleaning for health is a stealth fighter that flies below the radar, but offers protections not well understood or requested by customers — and that's ok, since taking better care of workers is the first priority and this will translate into lower turnover, less absenteeism, greater productivity, lower costs — and healthier customers whether they know it or not.

Malcolm Smith is the founder and CEO of Victory Lab/Micro-Clean (VLMC), a Texas-based building services firm providing hygiene solutions for environments where health is more important than aesthetics. VLMC is a Founding Corporate Member of the 501c3 [pending] Indoor Exposure Index (INDEX) and participant in the nonprofit’s Bioload Exposure Metric Index (BEMI), Indoor Air Quality Exposure Index (IAQEI), and Evidence-based Cleaning for Health (EB-CFH) pilots in the Dallas/Ft. Worth and surrounding areas.