Medical cleaning differs from office cleaning in three ways: zoning, equipment separation, and documentation. Get those right and the rest follows.
General guidance. Your practice’s own infection prevention and control protocol takes precedence, and should drive the specification.
Zoning
Divide the practice into zones and never share equipment between them:
| Zone | Includes |
|---|---|
| Clinical | Treatment rooms, procedure rooms, sluice |
| Semi-clinical | Nurse stations, dressing areas, sample handling |
| Public | Waiting room, reception, corridors |
| Amenity | Bathrooms, staff kitchen, staff room |
| Admin | Offices, meeting rooms |
Colour-coded equipment
Non-negotiable. Separate microfibre and mop systems per zone:
- Red, toilets and sluice
- Yellow, clinical areas and basins
- Blue, general public and admin areas
- Green, kitchen and food areas
Cloths are laundered or disposed of between zones, never carried across.
Every visit, clinical areas
- Treatment couches and chairs, all surfaces, including sides and base
- Couch adjustment levers and handles
- Examination lights, including the handle
- Equipment trolleys, top and shelves
- Work surfaces and benches
- Hand basins and tapware
- Soap and sanitiser dispensers
- Sharps container exterior and mounting
- Waste bin exteriors, lids and pedals
- Curtains checked (replaced or laundered per protocol)
- Door handles, both sides
- Light switches
- Floors mopped, corners and edges included
- Under couches and equipment
Every visit, waiting and reception
- Reception counter, both sides
- Eftpos terminal and keyboard
- Seating, arms, backs, seats, and the frame beneath
- Children’s toys and play equipment sanitised
- Magazines checked (many practices remove these entirely)
- Water cooler
- Door handles and push plates
- Hand sanitiser stations refilled
- Floors
- Entry glass
Every visit, bathrooms
Full commercial bathroom protocol, plus:
- Sanitary bins serviced
- Baby change table both surfaces
- Grab rails
- Any specimen pass-through hatch
Every visit, staff areas
- Kitchen benches, sink, appliances
- Staff room seating and tables
- Bins
- Floors
Weekly
- Skirtings throughout
- Internal glass and partitions
- Window sills
- Tiles and grout in wet areas
- Chair bases and castors
- Trolley wheels
- Equipment cable management
- Waste store cleaned
Monthly
- High dusting throughout
- Air vents and extract grilles
- Light fittings
- Under and behind fixed furniture
- Curtain rails
- Upholstery vacuumed and checked
- Fridge interiors (staff and, separately, any vaccine fridge, practice staff only)
What cleaners must not do
Define these explicitly in the specification:
- Handle sharps or open sharps containers
- Handle clinical waste beyond bagging and moving to the designated store
- Enter the vaccine fridge or touch any temperature-monitored equipment
- Move or clean patient records
- Clean the inside of any equipment
- Enter rooms in use
Documentation
This is why most practices switch cleaners.
Practice accreditation asks for evidence that cleaning happens to a defined standard. A cleaning contract is not evidence. A per-visit record showing which tasks were completed, when, by whom, is.
What a useful record contains:
- Date and time of visit
- Personnel attending
- Each task marked complete or not
- Photographic evidence
- Any issue identified
- Exportable, and retained for the accreditation period
Several of our medical clients now hand the monthly export straight to their assessor rather than reconstructing anything the week before.
Outbreak protocol
Agree in advance what changes during an outbreak:
- Increased frequency for high-touch surfaces
- Specific disinfectant and contact time
- Sequence changes (affected rooms last)
- Additional PPE
- Recorded separately for contact tracing
Having this agreed and written down before you need it is the difference between a controlled response and an improvised one.