How to Maintain a Safe and Healthy Environment in Aged Care

Aged care facilities need to be carefully managed to maintain a safe and healthy environment to protect residents. Reduced mobility also means an increased risk of severe injuries from slipping or falling which means your aged care cleaners must be extra vigilant.

Often, residents of retirement and nursing homes can experience a loss of mental performance, which exposes them to an increased risk of injury in an environment that people take for granted. Therefore, aged care facilities need to be appropriately managed, designed and maintained to mitigate risks. 

Security doors should be used to prevent the most vulnerable areas from gaining access to areas like the garden or property or areas with a particular concentration of health hazards such as the kitchen, with minimal supervision.

In addition, every room in the facility must be carefully maintained and monitored to minimise risk. You can do so by hiring professional cleaning staff to inspect and service the areas who specialise in aged care facilities. 

We understand exactly what goes into cleaning an aged care facility. We offer quality and reliable aged care cleaning services to ensure your facility is sterilised, safe and hygienic for your residents, staff, and visitors. 

These are a few of our best tips for how to maintain a safe and healthy environment in aged care.

Handwashing

Everyone understands that appropriate handwashing is critical to preventing the spread of germs and microbes that can make elders, and those who work with them, ill. Ensuring that employees, including your commercial cleaners, are appropriately taught handwashing practices is the first line of defence against illness and outbreak in an aged-care home.

Cleaning Surfaces and Objects

High-touch surfaces, such as kitchens and bathrooms, should be cleaned and sanitised regularly to limit the risk of illness and infection. To remove hazardous bacteria, kitchen worktops, bathroom sinks, and toilets must be thoroughly cleaned using the appropriate cleansers and sanitisers. Cleaning and sanitising should be done regularly, even daily in some circumstances, and sanitising should be done weekly or more frequently, depending on the surface. For example, in an aged-care facility’s kitchen, all surfaces must be sterilised before each meal is cooked. There are specific standards to observe in a kitchen that makes meals for individuals, especially when dealing with the elderly.

Changing Linen and Personal Items

In the fight against bacteria, it’s important to ensure that aged-care facilities change bedding and personal things regularly, especially if someone is sick. To limit the chances of the sickness reoccurring, this could entail changing toothbrushes or bedsheets. Bacteria can survive long enough on personal things to create a second outbreak, so it’s critical to keep living environments clean after a person has been sick.

Ensure the laundry consumables you are using are eco friendly, biodegradable products. Our buying power delivers you significant cost savings, our products give you more hygienic environments, and our commercial cleaning supplies and consumables provide you with greater compliance and sustainability.

Personal Protective Equipment

When working in an aged-care facility, it is critical that personnel, including residents, wear personal protective guides in the event of an outbreak or suspected outbreak for the health and safety of everyone involved. Your cleaners should wear personal protective equipment such as gloves and masks in regular life to prevent the spread of bacteria between themselves and residents in aged-care facilities; however, during an outbreak, the need to avoid infection spread is amplified.

Set up a medical-response system

Consider getting a medical alert gadget for your residents. You can get a wearable alarm for them to use in an emergency. They only need to touch the device’s button, and the appropriate emergency service will be notified.

Gardens and grounds

Residents in long-term care facilities often have access to a garden, but it’s another place that can pose serious health hazards if it’s not managed correctly. Bacteria is unavoidable in soil and plants; thus, providing plenty of concrete areas where residents may enjoy being outside without coming into contact with the ground is a good idea. 

Dirty walkways and pathways look substandard and leave a poor impression on your visitors so you should get them commercially pressure cleaned. At a time when COVID-19 is still prevalent, your aged care facility needs to be cleaner than ever and that means it also needs to look the part, inside and out.

The garden should be well-kept and rubbish appropriately disposed of to avoid unintentional contact with dangerous or unhygienic abandoned materials. 

Hallways and corridors

Injuries at aged care facilities are surprisingly common in hallways and corridors, and the reason for this is simple. While personnel may often pay close attention to individual rooms, the corridors are frequently overlooked. 

Lack of cleaning or maintenance can lead to trips, slips and falls. It’s as simple as ensuring that the facility’s hallways and corridors are cleaned and monitored to reduce the risk.