Keep Your Medical Office Safe & Sanitized

Medical offices come in all shapes and sizes, from large, suburban locations to small, city clinics and more. While the fundamentals of keeping a medical office clean, safe, and sanitized are the same (or at least start from the same place), the size, practice, and location of the medical office are but a few factors that make the particular process different for each. The good thing is that the medical field, from a cultural standpoint, generally has a much higher standard of safety and sanitation. 

If you’re part of the team or staff responsible for maintaining a medical office’s safety and sanitary standard, the past year and a half has probably been a crazy time. The pandemic heightened the public’s perception of health and safety across all areas of life, but especially in the medical field. This means more time, money, and effort are required to keep your medical office safe and sanitized, but don’t hang your head about it. Here are 3 tips to keep in mind:

Follow Government Guidelines

While the pandemic made it more difficult to maintain safe and sanitary facilities – namely, medical offices – it did trigger local, state, and federal governments into creating comprehensive, new guidelines accessible to the public. It’s best to simply relay you to a few of those to read up on more specific tips. The CDC’s guideline on cleaning and disinfecting your facility is a great place to start, and a solid follow up is California’s General Guidelines.

Clean & Sanitize…Your Tools

A tip that often flies under the radar is the need to clean and sanitize your cleaning and sanitization tools. Makes sense, right? If you don’t, it doesn’t matter how well you clean and sanitize, nor how much and how often, contaminated tools and supplies will render your efforts ineffective. Remember to do it!

Divide & Conquer

Before we get into what is meant by divide and conquer, it’s a good idea to suggest that, if you haven’t already done so since the beginning of the pandemic, you should completely re-do your medical office’s maintenance policies and procedures. In fact, you may even want to sit down with your office’s administration to discuss allocating more time and money to the overall effort to keep the office safe and sanitized. The goal is to create a concrete policy, and within your procedures, make sure to bulk up the list of tasks and frequency with which they’re conducted.

Now, once having done the above, divide up the areas of your office. Consider them completely exclusive of each other when applying your new maintenance policies and procedures. Not only is it nearly impossible to effectively maintain a safe and sanitary office if you don’t, you’ll waste a lot of the newly allocated resources. Dividing your medical office into rooms enables you to tailor the more specific maintenance needs of that space and improve your ability to maintain a safe and sanitary environment.