Evaluating the performance of housekeepers in a hospital setting is crucial, especially because cleanliness directly affects patient safety, infection rates, and overall satisfaction. You want to highlight and support those who are doing well and watch closely those who don’t live up to expectations.
What role do cleaning inspections play in your staff evaluations?
Cleanliness audits are a key part of any EVS Department’s Quality Management program. Consistent and complete inspections can play an important role in your ongoing employee evaluations. One problem that we frequently see is when Supervisors and Managers carry out hurried or incomplete inspections.
Discrepancies Only
In some cases, the supervisor or manager only logs discrepancies or failed items. This is a problem because the housekeeper is not given a score or rating that represents the quality of the work they actually did; they simply receive a list of deficiencies to be corrected. If the inspector had taken the time to record a proper sample of the work done, then we could calculate an accurate score for that housekeeper in that room. Over time, these scores paint a detailed picture of that person’s performance and can be used in their evaluation.
Pencil Whipping
In other cases, we can see that the inspector “pencil-whipped” the inspection, which happens when they simply give everything a pass without actually inspecting. We see this in Walsh QA Inspector when the inspection duration is unrealistically short. This is a real disservice to the housekeeper as well as the patient. If that housekeeper is a good worker, they realize that everyone gets 100%, even those less capable. Because their hard work will never be recognized, they eventually lose motivation. If, on the other hand that housekeeper is problematic, they too realize that their work is not being evaluated, and they don’t receive the motivation, nor the training needed to improve. In the end, it is the Patient who pays for this because there is no effective QA program in place.
This is a lost opportunity. With a few minutes more effort, you could have a complete and accurate evaluation that actually represents the quality of work of that housekeeper.
Best Practice
We have seen that the best practice is to perform complete evaluations, consistently. To make it simple, you could insist that at least 10 different items are inspected in each room. With this approach, inspections will take a little bit longer (but not much) and will be much more usable. Importantly, the scores for any housekeeper will, with time and consistency, actually represent their individual performance. Imagine two housekeepers, both have been inspected 5 times throughout the year by the same Supervisor. If each inspection covered 10 items in the room, and the first housekeeper scored an average of 95%, while the second scored an average of 75%, then we can reasonably conclude that the first housekeeper cleaned consistently better than the second.
While cleaning scores are not the only criteria for evaluating your housekeepers, they certainly are an important part of any performance evaluation. When you have a program of complete and consistent cleaning evaluations, you are creating the data that will make your housekeeper evaluations easier and more fair. In the end, you get a much cleaner hospital.