Managing director of Interclean Australasia Bill Bassett has toured the country to bring together people who are passionate about a higher level of clean at his most Cleaning Innovation and Benchmarking conferences. INCLEAN’s editor, Kim Taranto, was invited to attend the Sydney session held 3 March at Macquarie University Hospital.
Bill Bassett had a single motivating goal for the clients attending his conferences: to discover what their ‘dream clean’ is and offer them best practice cleaning products and solutions to achieve it. Jam-packed with exclusive sessions, international speakers, a panel of some of Australia’s leading healthcare managers and a wealth of new products and ideas, the conference’s purpose was to “help you and your team reach your cleaning and management goals,” said Bill.
Among the innovative solutions discussed was paperless auditing, app-based cleaning management, training at the operational level, national healthcare cleaning standards and benchmarking, and the latest disposable microfibre outbreak cleaning kits.
With a room full of healthcare cleaning managers, infection control officers, hospital directors and aged care facility managers, the answers he received from the cleaning industry about their ‘dream clean’ included ‘managing people remotely’, creating a happy workforce that is engaged and takes pride in its work, ‘implementing a totally automated system, a need for communication tracking, the struggle to reduce manual handling and the best way to take care of staff, and last but not least, full transparent reporting’.
“Together we can make a huge difference regarding innovative technology, shared ideas from nursing homes and hospital staff and the best practice methods for infection control,” Bill responded.
The Cleaning Manager app has been designed by some of Australia’s leading health and aged care cleaning managers to make cleaning management the easiest it’s ever been. It was created intentionally to include functions such as scheduling, real time supervision, resource management, training and capturing of extra cleaning tasks.
New products from partner TTS, the Italian manufacturer of the magic TouchPoint trolley system, Sangar Vedovato presented a smaller range of trolleys – or mobile workstations, as she calls them – that help to eliminate cross-contamination and offer concealed storage compartments to improve productivity.
“One extra trip made by a cleaner back and forth to the cleaner’s room over one year costs $973,” noted Sangar. “That’s what you can save, per cleaner, per year, with the extra storage of a magic trolley.”
Further highlights for delegates were presentations by two guest speakers. Michael Rochon spoke about outbreak cleaning and the inability to kill bacteria in biofilms on dry hospital surfaces using standard disinfection protocol and what it means for healthcare cleaning. Meanwhile Michele Massaro shared details about the HepaMedic hospital-grade cleaning equipment.
Bill wrapped up the conference by encouraging attendees to give feedback, ask questions and to “challenge us to create better systems and products for you to achieve your dream clean.”
