• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Deep Cleaning

The £53m Welsh hospital was hailed as a blueprint for next-generation medical care as the first hospital of its kind to provide each patient with their own personal bedroom and bathroom facilities.

However, it proved to be a blueprint for the importance of considering every detail meticulously; as a mysterious residue made the floors dangerously slippery. SitexOrbis moved quickly to acknowledge, identify and resolve this problem, and pass on learnings for future developments.

A new breed of hospital

Built on the old steelworks site in Ebbw Vale, the £53m Aneurin Bevan was named after the founder of the NHS,

and represented a seismic shift in medical care and operations. The culmination of ten years of planning, design and construction, the finished building realised a dream as the first NHS hospital to offer every patient their own bedroom and en-suite bathroom. With the contractors completing their work in mid-September 2010, SitexOrbis won the tender to carry out six weeks of clinical, uncompromising deep-cleaning to prepare the hospital for its opening – and the arrival of its patients.

The contract was for a full clinical deep clean, and this involved:

Photographing – The first task was is to use the PDA system to photograph each room before any work was undertaken.

Deep Cleaning – SitexOrbis employees then worked through the 96 bedroom hospital. In each room there was a system of thorough cleaning using steam first, then a microfibre cloth and the Duomax cleaning agent, with its proven efficacy of 99.9999%. With the exception of the newly painted walls, absolutely everything was cleaned, inside and out.

Workflow management and reporting – SitexOrbis employees registered on the PDA which room they were working on and which rooms had been completed. This meant that in real time the customer could see which rooms were complete and furniture could be moved in.

Vaporisation – The full clinical clean was followed by SitexOrbis’ unique vaporisation process which is also based on the DuoMax fluid. This final stage ensured that every square millimetre in every room was guaranteed to be completely disinfected, even the walls.

Swab tests – SitexOrbis used Hygiena Systemsure Plus – a system for monitoring adenosine triphosphate (ATP). This swabbing and testing checked that the high standards expected by SitexOrbis and the client were achieved consistently. The test results were also recorded using the PDAs to leave a full audit trail. SitexOrbis also sent swabs off to the Health Protection Agency for analysis before and after cleaning for certification. Again, all the results we collated and reported with a full audit trail.

Identifying "snags" - while cleaning so thoroughly the SitexOrbis team were in the best possible situation to identify even the smallest issues that the builders needed to return and correct, even those that people might not notice. Each “snag” was photographed and reported on a daily basis. The builder actually queried some of the snags. However because of how thoroughly SitexOrbis reviewed the data it could be proved that the snag was there when SitexOrbis entered the room. Occasionally fixing snags meant having to disinfect a room again. The rapid inexpensive vaporisation was perfect here: The reporting system could identify which rooms had been visited by contractors and a quick vaporisation removed any germs that might have been introduced.

Additional PDFs