MRSA: Be Ready To Address Customer Concerns

At the ISSA/INTERCLEAN^® show last October, there was one word on everyone’s lips: MRSA. Since then, I’ve seen MRSA coverage pop up everywhere from my local newspaper to 60 Minutes.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA for short, is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, the first reported case in the United States was in 1968. But with all the recent coverage, your customers are going to be treating it like a new problem and will start asking questions (if they aren’t already) and demanding answers from their BSCs.

Look for the tools to address these questions in the pages of Contracting Profits (see “newsbriefs”). We’ve recently added a MRSA section to our Web site, CleanLink, that includes news items, articles, products, blogs and more. Log on to stay up-to-date and educated.

The good news for building service contractors is that protecting students, patients and office tenants from MRSA includes the same cleaning tasks they are already performing on a routine basis, including properly disinfecting surfaces and promoting hand washing. So, most BSCs shouldn’t have to overhaul their cleaning procedures to address MRSA. They are most likely already doing their part. Now they just need to educate their customers.