Our crews disinfect high touch surfaces daily

Patients and staff share the same surfaces

A medical office has a short list of surfaces that nearly everyone touches. They include the check-in counter, waiting room chair arms, door handles, light switches, elevator buttons and the faucet and flush handles in each restroom. Sick patients and healthy staff share every one of them from the first appointment to the last. Our crews are trained to clean and disinfect those high touch surfaces every day, and we treat them as the center of the job rather than a finishing touch.

In a medical office, most of the work happens after the last patient leaves. Evening crews can move through exam rooms and restrooms without interrupting a visit, and disinfectant can sit on a surface as long as it needs. A busy practice can also add a day porter, a cleaner who stays on site during clinic hours. The porter restocks the restrooms and wipes down the waiting room between the morning rush and the afternoon one. That midday stretch is when restrooms in a busy clinic get the dirtiest.

Illinois winters add work to this routine. From the first snow until spring, patients carry slush and road salt in on their boots and wheelchair wheels. It spreads from the entry into the waiting room and down the exam hallway. Flu season falls in the same months, so the waiting room is fuller and more of the people in it are sick. That's the season to increase cleaning at the entry and in the waiting room. A wet floor by the door is a fall risk, and many patients at a clinic are already unsteady on their feet.

• High touch surfaces disinfected every day
• Color coded microfiber cloths and flat mops
• Hospital grade disinfectant left wet long enough
• Intensive initial cleaning at no additional cost
• Surface testing after the initial cleaning

Disinfectant has to stay wet to work

Disinfecting is a two step job, and the order matters. The surface gets cleaned first. A film of skin oil or a dried coffee ring sits between the disinfectant and the germs under it. Disinfectant sprayed over grime gets used up on the grime. The hospital grade disinfectant goes on only after the counter or handle is clean. That's also when the clock starts, because every disinfectant has a set time it must stay wet on the surface.

That set time is called dwell time, and it's printed on the product label. It can be several minutes. For the whole of that time the surface has to stay wet, or the disinfectant stops working partway through. The shortcut that fails is spray and wipe: one pass of the bottle and an immediate wipe. The counter looks and smells clean afterward, and much of what was on it survives.

Giving a hospital grade disinfectant the right dwell time takes some attention in this climate. Through an Illinois winter, a building runs its heat for months and the indoor air gets very dry. A thin mist on a counter can dry before its time is up. So the crew puts down enough product to keep the surface wet the whole time, and moves to the next surface while the first one works.

We color code every cloth and mop

A cloth that wipes a toilet seat and then a reception counter moves whatever was on the toilet onto the counter. That's cross contamination, and in a medical office it undoes the rest of the cleaning. Our crews use color coded microfiber cloths and flat mops to stop it. Each color is kept to one kind of area, so a restroom cloth never touches a front desk. Anyone can look at a cleaning cart and see whether that rule is being kept.

Microfiber matters as much as the color. Its fibers are fine enough to lift grime off a surface and hold on to it, where a cotton rag tends to push it around. Done right, a loaded cloth goes into the laundry bag and a clean one comes off the cart. What fails is one rag and one spray bottle for the whole suite, restrooms included. It leaves every surface looking wiped and carries restroom germs to the front desk.

Floors follow the same rule. Many medical suites around Lisle are in low brick office buildings or strip center storefronts, usually with vinyl tile in exam rooms and hallways. A string mop dipped back into one bucket carries the first room's dirt into every room after it. In January that bucket is also full of salt water from the entry. A flat mop gets a clean pad for each area, and the pad color tells the crew which rooms it belongs in.

Your first visit is an intensive cleaning

When a medical building starts with us, the first visit is an Intensive Initial Cleaning, included at no additional cost. That first pass goes after what daily cleaning tends to skip. In a clinic, that means the dust on top of exam room cabinets and the buildup at the base of each toilet. It also means the corners behind waiting room chairs and the underside of the check-in counter. After it, the daily crew keeps a clean building clean instead of chasing old dirt.

The next step is Surface Clean Testing. After the initial cleaning, we test surfaces with equipment, and we come back and test again from time to time. A counter can look spotless and still carry a film nobody can see. A test gives a reading in place of a walk-through where someone glances around and says it looks fine. For a practice manager, a reading is a better answer to a complaint than an opinion.

After that, the Everyday Cleaner Standard is the daily job, and every building has one point of contact on our side who is responsible for it. The people doing the work are our own staff, and many have been with us for over ten years. In a medical office, that means the same people learn which exam rooms get the heaviest use and which restroom needs attention by midday. One customer, Richard Hickey, wrote on Google: "Cleaner Living does a fabulous job cleaning our facility! I highly recommend them to any commercial space looking to ensure their office is sanitized and well maintained!"