Healthcare environmental hygiene is increasingly recognized as critical in infection prevention and control (IPC). Much like its predecessor World Hand Hygiene Day, the objective of the Clean Hospitals Day, celebrated each year on October 20, is to raise awareness and foster engagement among healthcare facilities around the world. A newly published tool, the Healthcare Environmental Hygiene Self-Assessment Framework (HEHSAF), has been developed and internationally validated to help healthcare facilities identify areas for improvement in their environmental hygiene programs as well as benchmark this improvement over time. Healthcare facilities can download the full promotional tool kit and posters (Appendix Fig. 1 online) for Clean Hospitals Day 2023 from www.CleanHospitals.com.
The launch of the HEHSAF tool in at least 7 languages (ie, Chinese, Croatian, English, French, Portugese, Spanish, and Turkish) marks the first time that a global snapshot of healthcare environmental hygiene programs is being attempted. The tool is geared toward IPC experts and environmental hygiene managers to help them identify areas for improvement in their facilities. This tool has been in development since 2018, and it consists of a 96-question secure, online tool based on a multimodal improvement strategy. A pilot study using an earlier version of the tool was conducted by Clean Hospitals in 51 healthcare facilities in 35 countries. Reference Peters, Schmid, Kraker, Parneix and Pittet1 The tool was further developed with the help of an international expert group and was validated internationally in 7 additional countries.
The HEHSAF is published on the online platform REDCap, a secure web application for building and managing online surveys and databases. It is specifically geared to support online and offline data capture for research studies and operations. Available exclusively to institutions, REDCap is used by the most prestigious universities around the world. Currently, >6,600 institutions in >150 countries trust the security of the platform. 2 Although healthcare facilities that complete the HEHSAF will have access to their own detailed data, only anonymized and aggregated data are shared. This factor is of utmost importance to ensure that healthcare facilities are comfortable being transparent when filling out the tool.
With global implementation, the HEHSAF will give institutions a roadmap for improving their environmental hygiene, supporting environmental services staff, increasing the visibility of healthcare environmental hygiene on a global level, and saving lives by reducing healthcare-associated infections. The HEHSAF and a full Clean Hospitals Day tool kit can be found on the Clean Hospitals website (www.CleanHospitals.com). The tool is also available at the following link: https://redcap.link/HEHSAF. Let’s improve healthcare environmental hygiene together and save lives.
Supplementary material
For supplementary material accompanying this paper visit https://doi.org/10.1017/ice.2023.208
Acknowledgments
The authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in this article and these views do not necessarily represent the views, decisions, or policies of the institutions with which they are affiliated. Alexandra Peters is the scientific adviser, and Pierre Parneix and Didier Pittet are, respectively, the vice chair and the chair the Clean Hospitals Association. Clean Hospitals aims to harness industry strengths to align and improve the implementation of best practices recommendations for environmental hygiene in health care in different parts of the world, including in least developed countries. In this instance, academic partners, companies, and industries focused on advancing environmental hygiene and infection control aim to improve access to affordable products and techniques as well as through education and research.
Financial support
This work is supported by the Infection Control Programme (SPCI), University of Geneva Faculty of Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland.
Competing interests
All listed authors declare no financial support, grants, financial interests, or consultancy that could lead to conflicts of interest.
