How clean would you want an area if someone’s life depended on it?
When it comes to medical offices, cleaning is vitally important. A clean office is about more than looking professional to your visitors. It’s also about creating a space that is safe for sick people to visit.
Still on the fence about why medical office cleaning is so important? Keep reading to discover the answer!
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Medical Office Cleaning: Thorough and Effective
We’ve put together a compelling list of reasons that you should use professionals for medical office cleaning. But let’s start with the primary reason: you, your staff, and your patients deserve cleaning that is both thorough and effective. Chances are that you have existing janitorial services or other cleaning services for your medical office. But do they know which “high-touch” areas to focus on? Are they using chemicals that can clean and sterilize without damaging the environment? The simple truth is that the average cleaner cannot clean everything to the standards that a medical office needs. But when you hire reliable professionals, they know exactly how to make your office cleaner and safer than ever before.
Save Money
Even if they want to hire professional cleaners, many medical offices hesitate to do so. Why? The primary reason is that they worry about taking on the additional costs. Your medical office probably isn’t swimming in extra money. So you might also be asking the question: can I really afford to hire professional cleaners? But the surprising truth is that hiring professional cleaners may actually save you money over the longterm. The primary reason for this is that your existing cleaning services aren’t getting everything as clean and sanitary as it needs to be. While it may seem cheaper to keep doing what you have been doing, a workplace filled with bacteria may infect your employees and seriously hurt your employee productivity. And the conditions may even open you up to legal liability if your medical office is not adhering to compliance regulations (more on this later).
If you don’t hire professional cleaners, the only other option is to hire and train your own in-house team. The time it takes to properly train everyone is very cost-prohibitive. And paying a salary and benefits to an in-house team will create a regular (and significant) drain on your resources. Hiring outside professionals, then, gives you the best of both worlds. You get all the benefits of professional cleaners using industry-grade chemicals and equipment, and all at a fraction of the time and costs associated with the alternative solutions.
Better Than Conventional Cleaning
Previously, we touched on the idea that dedicated medical office cleaners are better than conventional cleaners. But why, exactly, is this the case? The main reason for this is something you already know: a medical office isn’t like any other office. A business that primarily cleans corporate offices will quickly be in over its head when it comes to cleaning and sanitizing a medical office.
Furthermore, the chemicals that are sufficient to clean areas like corporate breakrooms may not be sufficient to clean and sanitize a medical office. And if they do a poor job, it may put countless local people in danger of infection. What if you need to clean areas beyond the medical office? In that case, you can hire cleaners that have extensive experience cleaning commercial, community, and office buildings. Instead of trusting a conventional cleaner with your medical office, why not hire a local cleaner who can handle just about everything?
Freeing You Up
Another reason that some managers hesitate to hire professional cleaners is pretty basic. Such managers usually ask why the existing staff cannot simply do a better job of cleaning and sanitizing their own work areas. There are several reasons why this is a bad idea. We have already covered some reasons, including the fact that your staff may not be properly qualified and may not have access to the right equipment or cleaning chemicals. But even if your staff could do a perfect job on their own, making them constantly clean their own areas actually cuts into their productivity and overall effectiveness. Simply put, they won’t be able to do their primary jobs if they are busy trying to constantly clean their areas. Hiring professional cleaners is about more than creating a safe environment. It’s also about freeing professionals up to do what they do best in a clean and safe environment.
Compliance Issues
Needless to say, medical offices are under constant scrutiny. You must constantly make sure that your offices and your actions are in compliance with many agencies. This includes the JCAHO, HIPAA, CDC, OSHA. Compliance violations are no small matter. Such violations can cost people their jobs and, at worst, even get your entire medical office shut down! Unfortunately, it’s very easy to unknowingly cause compliance violations. And it’s especially easy to do so if you are leaving the cleaning and sanitizing to people and groups that don’t have a clear idea about what they are doing. By hiring professional cleaners with extensive medical office experience, you can ensure that you stay in compliance. In this way, you can keep your jobs and your office just as safe as the building itself.
Making the Right Impression
So far, we have focused on the impact that professional cleaning has on your staff and your medical office. But have you considered the impact it may have on your patients and other visitors? The simple truth is that first impressions matter for a medical office as much as any other business. If someone comes in and the area looks dirty or cluttered, they are likely to walk right back out the door. And this is particularly important when it comes to patients. Sick patients are understandably worried about their condition worsening and about the risk of infecting others. By creating an area that is clean, warm, and inviting, you can strike the right impression and make everyone feel right at home.
Importance of Germ Control
Germ control is important for any professional environment. But it is especially important for a medical office. The reason is that in such an office, there is always a risk of cross-contamination. Regular cleaning with the right tools and equipment, however, can significantly reduce that cross-contamination risk. But as we noted above, you can’t simply trust your germ control to your existing staff or to traditional cleaners or janitors. If they should use sub-par chemicals, substandard equipment, or simply ignore cleaning the high-touch areas, then your risk of cross-contamination remains very high. At the end of the day, you shouldn’t have to overthink germ control. Why not achieve true peace of mind and hire professional cleaners with extensive experience with hospital cleaning services?
Retaining Patients
We like to think of medical careers as more of a calling than a business. Nevertheless, there are certain business realities you can’t really escape from. And one of those realities is the need to retain patients. Once you begin to think of your medical office as a business, you are left with a simple conclusion. Namely, that you have a lot of competition. And if your patients aren’t satisfied when they leave your office, they are not likely to come back anytime soon.
Still not convinced? Imagine visiting a restaurant and finding a hair in your food. It might be a simple mistake that almost never happens, but are you going to go back anytime soon? That’s how it is for patients who walk into a medical office and that looks cluttered and unclean. The actual medical services offered might be top-notch and the prices may be very competitive. But if a customer thinks the environment is dirty and unsanitary, they are going to pack their bags for somewhere a little cleaner.
Productive Employees
There is another important way that a medical office is like any other business. Ultimately, your office is only as effective as your employees are productive. Even if they aren’t having to worry about cleaning and sanitizing their work areas, an unclean environment can cut into employee productivity. And that’s assuming that the employees actually show up! When your office isn’t properly cleaned, it is inevitable that employees will get sick (and probably after passing the sickness to other employees). This may dramatically increase the number of employee call-outs, and that can disrupt your entire operation. Ask yourself: why run the risk at all? By hiring reliable professional cleaners, you can boost the existing productivity of your medical office staff. At the same time, you can offer them significant protection against getting sick on the job. Employees will be grateful for the added production. And administrators will be happy at the reduction in employee call-outs!
Adaptable Professionals
We’ve reviewed several of the most important reasons that you should hire cleaning professionals with medical office experience instead of going with just any cleaning company. But one of the most important reasons is that you need a cleaner who is adaptable to unique client needs and unexpected situations. If we’re being honest, almost any company can develop a simple cleaning protocol. And it doesn’t take much effort to apply that protocol to every office they clean. But as we have said, a medical office isn’t like a standard business office. And the tools, tech, and techniques used to clean a business office may not be that safe or effective when cleaning your medical office. When you hire the right professional cleaners, though, they can customize everything to your exact needs. And if you need services beyond the standard package, they will go the extra mile and provide the custom service that you deserve.
Environmentally-Friendly
You don’t have to be a veteran cleaner to know that chemicals can be dangerous. And even if a chemical does a good job of cleaning a surface, that chemical could be doing some major damage to the environment and to the lungs of anyone working nearby. When you hire professional cleaners, you remove all of the annoying guesswork that comes with using chemicals. You are guaranteed they will use chemicals that are 100% environmentally-friendly.
Using these environmentally-friendly chemicals can help your medical office meet different compliance regulations. And it can also benefit your staff recruitment and patient retention. When given a choice, most people would like to make choices that help sustain the environment. And knowing that the chemicals used are environmentally-friendly is just one more reason patients and staff will have to keep coming back.
Specialized Equipment
Here’s an open secret: not all cleaning equipment is created equal. And the kinds of equipment that might be fine to help someone clean a home kitchen or a school lunchroom may not be up to the task of cleaning and disinfecting the high-touch, high germ-risk areas of your medical office. It’s true that you could always purchase specialized equipment for your existing staff. But this represents a major added expense. And as we noted earlier, everyone involved would still need extensive training in how to properly use that equipment.
When you hire the right professional cleaners, they already have all of the specialized equipment needed to get the job done. And they have the training and experience to know which equipment to use for specific tasks. This all goes back to the need for customized cleaning services. If you want a cleaner that is properly adaptable to your changing needs, then you need to hire a cleaner that has the right equipment to get the job done.
What’s Next?
Now you know why it’s so important to hire professional cleaners for your medical office cleaning needs. But do you know which cleaners you can rely on?
Here at ProCleanings, we have the experience needed to keep you and your office safe. And we have the extensive training and specialized equipment to get the job done quickly and efficiently.
To see what a difference ProCleanings can make, all you have to do is contact us today!