Keen on maintaining its reputation for excellence, Sant Pau hospital in Barcelona, Spain, wanted to improve the way that cleaning is managed in the hospital.
The hospital chose to implement SmartView, a cloud-based technology created by Sealed Air Diversey Care.
This comprises a management system which, says the company, can increase cleaning efficiency and lower costs by reducing the number of patients that have to prolong their stay as a result of hospital acquired infections (HAI).
Having been in existence for over 600 years, Sant Pau hospital is a centre that has succeeded in adapting through the centuries and is currently at the leading edge of medicine, gaining international respect.
In 2016, more than 145,000 emergencies were recorded, 35,000 patients admitted and there were 350,000 external consultations. In total, 36,000 surgical operations were carried out.
In the past at Sant Pau, the completion of key cleaning tasks was monitored and the operational processes followed, however, no specific data was collected.
To avoid bacterial growth in the different areas of the hospital, microbiological plates were regularly sent to laboratories, but the centre was looking for a system that could help properly manage the cleaning process and give an overview of the situation.
It was, for instance, not possible to see in real time who was executing a task and in which area of the hospital.
"The incidences that can happen during cleaning procedures were not tracked either: for example, if suddenly it was not possible anymore to clean one of the rooms of the hospital because a patient was still in it, this information didn’t appear anywhere”, says Cristina García Arcos, Healthcare Sector Leader at Sealed Air Diversey Care in Spain.
After being shown SmartView, an integrated platform that provides real-time monitoring and reporting, the hospital expressed its interest, since the system enables comprehensive analysis of cleaning tasks by effective digitalisation of data.
In March 2016, SmartView was implemented at Sant Pau. The main benefit is that the platform enables a real-time management and supervision of the cleaning process, making possible to monitor every cleaning task that is taking place or has been done in the hospital thanks to its cloud based technology.
“It is not only possible to check by whom and where these tasks have been completed but also to have useful insights about the cleaning quality, the productivity and time management,” says Garcia Arcos.
Furthermore, as the system reports about all these parameters, it provides analysis, can identify potential problems related to hygiene and cleaning standards and alert the staff, even before they happen. This is especially valuable to anticipate and take preventive measures.
SmartView has many other functions, for instance the possibility to manage room occupancy and see which of the 644 beds of the hospital are available or not.
Additionally, the system is designed to be easy for employees to work with since it is based on visuals, making monitoring quickly understandable from any device and can easily be interlinked to other databases.
All these valuable aspects enable the team to adjust to the hospital’s budget by making the right decisions, according to Garcia Arcos.
Garcia Arcos adds: "The whole cleaning protocol is currently well structured, and the appropriate corrective measures can be applied on time, when and where necessary.
“The cause of a recurrent bacterial outbreak happening every Wednesday could for instance be identified. The hospital found out that the cleaning protocol wasn’t properly followed over the weekends and could take the appropriate measures”, she says.
More importantly, “SmartView [provides] a clear visibility over the cleaning process and, consequently, to manage it more effectively. This effective management is a crucial point in a hospital, as it is directly linked to the safety of patients," says Garcia Arcos.