Every year, the 20th of October is marked as Clean Hospitals Day, an occasion designed to enhance awareness about the crucial importance of healthcare environmental hygiene (HEH) in preventing infections. By fostering greater recognition and appreciation of the staff in environmental services (EVS), this day promotes the active engagement of facilities to ensure the best standards of patient care. The focus of this year’s theme, ‘Human Factors and Collaboration’, underlines the critical role played by environmental service workers and their management in infection prevention and control (IPC). Although generally underestimated, HEH has emerged as a noteworthy field of IPC. The healthcare environment is increasingly being acknowledged as a principal source of pathogen transmission. This can happen either directly through contaminated objects, shared medical equipment, or via hand contamination.
One of the main global issues in infectious diseases are healthcare-associated infections, which are also major contributors to antibiotic consumption. Therefore, mitigation of such infections not only conserves lives, resources, and funds, but also importantly curbs antibiotic usage, thus diminishing the selective pressure that fuels antibiotic resistance.
Healthcare environmental hygiene encompasses technical domains as well as human factors. The technical components pertain to surfaces, air control, water control, device reprocessing and sterilization, laundry, waste management etc., the environments inside healthcare facilities that must be attended to both physically and microbiologically to ensure the safety of all stakeholders – patients, staff, visitors and the larger environment. On the other hand, the human factors revolve around the personnel responsible for maintaining hygiene and their actions. They encapsulate a range of aspects from EVS training and management to team dynamics, career progression, internal communication, and nurturing a safety culture within facilities.
Indeed, the importance of the impact of human factors on the standard of HEH cannot be underestimated, albeit being generally more challenging to enhance or even quantify as compared to the technical variables. This is illustrated in the World Health Organization (WHO) Multimodal Improvement Strategy (MMIS). Of its five components, ‘system change’ and ‘workplace reminders’ deal with primarily technical factors, while the other three facets concern human elements, underscoring their centrality to the quality of an HEH program.
However, a long journey lies ahead. EVS workers’ contributions to IPC are not as recognized as they should be globally. They are often underpaid and under-trained, and constraints on cleaning time due to cost-cutting measures, and communication gaps between EVS and clinical staff springing from language barriers can further compromise care quality.
The Clean Hospitals Day promotional toolkit, available at https://cleanhospitals.com/promotional-toolkit-2025/, is rich with resources including posters, selfie boards, social media tiles, and a frame for profile pictures. Healthcare facilities are encouraged to use these resources for their own campaigns to celebrate Clean Hospitals Day worldwide. In addition, the Healthcare Environmental Hygiene Self-Assessment Framework (HEHSAE) tool can be accessed at https://cleanhospitals.com/hehsaf/, which provides a practical means for healthcare facilities to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their HEH programs and thereby identify areas for improvement. The tool is available in 15 languages.
As we celebrate Clean Hospitals Day, let us redouble our efforts to recognize and give due credit to the staff that make it possible.
Source: https://aricjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13756-025-01638-y