June 2003

I recently spoke with cleaning industry consultant Steve Ashkin. I approached Steve for feedback on this month’s cover story on infection control. I started our conversation by reciting the alarming Chicago Tribune statistics regarding in-house medical facility infection rates — a.k.a. nosocomial infection rates. Then I asked him how culpable he thought cleaning crews were in the hospitals compiling these staggering infection rates.

Steve felt there were two ways to look at the environmental services role in this controversy: You could say environmental services departments have dropped the ball when it comes to infection control. Or, you could accuse health-care facilities of balancing budgets on the back of the facilities management mission.

It seems that burgeoning capital investment budgets, in some cases, may have been justified by cutting back on operational spending. The return on investment associated with state-of-the-art scanning/diagnosis equipment is easier to grasp for some health-care bean counters than the real cost of neglecting the due diligence necessary to combat — in this case — infection.

It’s up to the environmental services managers to step up to the plate and educate administrators on the importance of investing in “preventive medicine” closer to home. Try to quantify and qualify the cost of downtime, decreased productivity, lawsuits and tarnished reputations against the cost of first-class disease control.

Don’t drop the ball ... and, watch your back.