The NHS Scotland National Cleaning Services Specification: Healthcare Associated Infection Task Force

THE NHSSCOTLAND NATIONAL CLEANING SERVICES SPECIFICATION

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

CLEANING SERVICES SPECIFICATION

A & E - Accident and Emergency.

ACAD - an Ambulatory Care and Development Centre.

Audit - a process which allows for the systematic and critical analysis of the quality of service.

Benchmarking - use of a standard or point of reference for the purpose of comparison, usually in the context of improving performance.

BMTU - Bone Marrow Transplant Unit.

CCU - Coronary Care Unit.

Cleaning Service Provider - defined as the organisation co-ordinating and delivering cleaning services within specified locations - applies to in-house team, external contractor, Facilities Management provider.

Clinical Clean - Clinical Clean Rooms are areas where 'clean' clinical procedures are carried out, e.g. treatment rooms.

Dirty Utility - Examples of dirty utility room are, sluice rooms, or areas that are used for the decontamination of medical equipment.

Discharge Clean - A discharge clean should take place after each patient discharge. Local flexibility is required in order that daily programmed clean can be reprogrammed/reallocated thus avoiding requirement for additional cleaning input.

HDU - High Dependency Unit. This is a clinical area where patients require a high level of clinical care but are not ventilated. Examples would be SCBU (Special Care Baby Units) Medical and Surgical High Dependency Units.

ICU - Intensive Care Unit, or Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU). Also included in this category would be Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), Neurology Intensive Care (NLIC).

IDU - Infectious Disease Unit.

Isolation Room - A room in which certain categories of patients, particularly those with alert organisms or communicable diseases can be cared for with a minimum of contact with the rest of the patients/clients. No recommendation/frequency is given for soft flooring in isolation rooms because this type of flooring should not be present in isolation rooms.

Monitoring - is the on-going assessment of the outcomes of cleaning processes.

PAF - Performance Assessment Framework - the method used within NHSScotland to measure the performance of NHS Boards against agreed indicators.

Peer Review - review of a service by those with expertise and experience in that service, either as a provider, user or carer but who are not involved in its provision in the area under review.

PPM - Parts per million.

SCIEH - Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health.

Service User - defined as patients and visiting public.

SSD (CSSD) - Sterile Services Department.

Terminal Clean - the procedure required to ensure that an area has been cleaned/decontaminated after a patient with an alert organism or communicable disease has been nursed in the area, in order to render it safe for the next patient.