Housekeeper for a Day

Recently, Erika Vitale, Infection Prevention & Control Quality Analyst, had the opportunity to become a “housekeeper for a day”. Not everyone gets the opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes, and I’d like to share some of her experience with you.

Erika was paired up with a housekeeper on Medicine A; in the course of her work she noted that there appeared to be good collaboration between housekeeping and nursing in terms of making safer patient care a priority. Physicians were also very accommodating in allowing the housekeeper to finish up their tasks.

At Chatham Kent Health Alliance (CKHA), housekeeping audits are done regularly to ensure that high touch areas are not missed, when a patient commented “boy, I wouldn’t want to be watched at work like that – you work so hard you don’t deserve that.” The housekeeper kindly explained that ”it’s really important to monitor this to make sure we are all doing the best job we can and that we are all aware of areas that might get missed – it helps us to remember them in the future. Once you miss it once, you likely won’t miss it again.” Erika found out what that was like when an audit showed she missed a light switch when she thought she was being very thorough! (See picture below.)

At left, a special light used during auditing reveals an area that was missed during cleaning.  

Audits such as this are done at CKHA on a regular basis. 

At the end of the day, Erika had the following comments. “When I hear the term housekeeper, I think of someone who washes floors, and dusts furniture. What we have in this hospital are people who are much more experienced and knowledgeable about maintaining a safe environment than what this name implies. They are hard working and passionate about their jobs and the role they play in patient safety. I suggest the term “clinical environmental specialist”

I’d like to say thank our housekeeping staff for welcoming Erika to their work and also for everything they do each day to keep our patients safe. Thanks also to Erika for taking the time to “walk a mile in their shoes”, and for sharing her experience.