What is the difference between hospital hygiene and hospital cleanliness?

Reflection on Infection Prevention and Control, October 25th 2024

Guest post: Sally Bloomfield,

At Infection Prevention 2024 in September, I gave a presentation on this issue which I found challenging and thought-provoking to write. I started from the point that environmental hygiene and cleanliness in healthcare settings has 2 fundamentally different functions:

“Hygiene” through practices that reduce risk of exposure of patients, healthcare personnel and visitors to pathogenic microbes

“Visual cleanliness”  which is vital to sustaining patient, visitor and staff perception that high quality care is being delivered

Is hygiene important – yes! – but so is cleanliness – but it’s the elephant in the room. Looking through research papers and healthcare infection prevention, cleaning and hygiene guidelines, this isn’t discussed or explained.

Since 2018, IFH has done a significant amount of polling showing that, although the public are concerned about hygiene, they are confused about the difference between hygiene and cleanliness and it acts as a barrier to practicing effective and sustainable hygiene. Since cleaning and healthcare professionals move constantly between professional and everyday lives, and formative years are spent in a domestic environment, we need to consider whether this impacts their interpretation of healthcare guidelines.

This short blog looks at some of the key findings from IFH polling about people perceptions about the difference between hygiene and cleanliness and how it effects their hygiene behaviours.

The blog can be found at https://reflectionsipc.com/2024/10/25/what-is-the-difference-between-hospital-hygiene-and-hospital-cleanliness/