Careful tracking of both employee performance and overall cleanliness levels in health-care patient areas can help environmental services managers troubleshoot problem areas. But the management inspection and assessment process is a work-intensive, time-consuming task, accompanied by reams of paperwork and extensive data-entry work. Also, important details can get lost in the translation from printed data to a computer database.

Managers looking to streamline their performance-tracking process may want to consider handheld, Web-enabled multimedia microprocessor systems, similar to the increasingly popular personal digital assistants or personal data assistant technology.

One such system, the Walsh Quality Support System (QSS), features a handheld PC designed for health-care room audits. The system allows managers to customize a checklist for their facility, giving each item in a room a cleanliness rating of 1 to 5. Items can be weighted based on importance — managers might rate items that patients touch as more important than those on the backside bed headboards, for example.

Instead of hand-writing an inspection form and then rewriting or copying it for staff review, the PC uploads typed information into the facility’s database. The upload lowers the risk of data transcription error or lost paperwork. Also, having the information in a database makes it easier for managers to note cleaning trends and discrepancies because information can be supplemented with graphs and reports.

Kathy O’Dell, chief, environmental management service for Amarillo (Texas) VA Health Care System, switched to QSS because it allowed for more thorough tracking of conditions and cleaning performance.

“With our old method, you would notice things that needed correcting, but you didn’t track ones that are clean or overlooked,” she says. “[QSS] gives a consistent look every time in every room.”

Rating conditions and performance
In addition to rating rooms, the system also can be used to rate employee performance. Managers can note which employees may need additional training by tracking the quality of the rooms they clean. If a problem comes up, a supervisor can address the situation. Managers also can graph employee progress over time.

Bob Hibbert, director of environmental services for Illini Hospital in Silvis, Ill., has used QSS for more than a year to track and rate 40 employees based on their cleaning performance.

In the past, he based his employee ratings on intuition and the “pencil and paper” method, but began to find the process tedious and too subjective. Now, with QSS, he can guarantee objectivity with the rating system and zero-in on individual performances and specific discrepancies.

“People are looking for feedback on performance,” he says. “This is a good, hard-nails way to provide them with that information.”

Dan Weltin • Products Editor




POSTED ON: 6/1/2003