How do you check your cleaning?
A quick visual check? I have had enquiries about being an independent assessor of cleaning in hotels and restaurants. This led me to think about how to share this with a wider audience.
Do you have the cleaning checked by a supervisor or by the person who cleaned it? Are you recording it? Are you measuring your cleaning trends and the improvements that you have made?
Rapid hygiene swabs use ATP (Adenosine Tri Phosphate) or protein and either bio luminescence or colour changes to give an indication of total cleanliness or hygiene. Companies such as 3M and Hygienia manufacture and supply swab systems and there are other companies which also supply kits. I would always recommend checking a sample kit for your business. I have written the rapid hygiene chapter for a downloadable handbook published by 3M. You can get a copy here.
Checking your cleaning in hotels and restaurants
The kitchen & bars
As part of a management audit of a series of kitchens and bars, I set up plans, trained other auditors and performed the tests using a rapid hygiene kit, supplied by 3M. Over a year, the pass rate improved and I was also able to demonstrate that steaming cutlery reduced the hygiene of the cutlery. The area that failed the most were can openers. This was also the case with microbiological swabs. The managers of the sites were then tasked with doing the swabs on a weekly basis. The original swab results (which were numbers and a pass/fail) were locked into the testing unit, the retests could also be seen.
Results
The results were that hygiene improved and this could be demonstrated. The client was happy that the hygiene could be demonstrated and even happier that this was improving
The hotel room
This exercise could be part of a regular inspection to assess the cleaning of hotel rooms.
The client company or the facilities management supplier could use the skill of an independent auditor to measure and manage the cleaning, using a rapid hygiene assessment. A skilled third party would produce a plan to check the cleaning and the results would be reportable. Improvements could be demonstrated over time. Rapid hygiene monitoring can also deliver results within minutes, so that the cleaning manager can immediately rectify any poor results and the team can learn where to focus their efforts. The areas checked are, typically, where hygiene is important, such as bathrooms and hospitality trays.
The gym
Developing the audits from the kitchens, it was suggested that the gym was also assessed for cleanliness using rapid hygiene swabs. The results on hand contact surfaces on both equipment and furniture demonstrated good cleaning and this was then checked on an ongoing basis.
If this is something that you are interested in discussing more, get in touch.
