Jamie Morgan, Health Facilities Management
Efficiency is one of the health care field’s favorite words, and it has expressed itself in various ways as organizations look for ways to improve workflow with the goal of extending those improvements to patient care.

Matt Poe, American Laundry News
Healthcare laundry standards have been a hot topic over the past few years.

Matt Poe, American Laundry News
With different programs available for laundries to be self-regulated, along with the requirements of federal and regional organizations, some concerns have arisen.

Edward Sullivan, facilitiesnet.com
Discretionary costs are not necessarily less important than consequential costs - but you have to know the difference.

Amber Hogan Mitchell, DrPH, MPH, CPH, Infection Control Today
According to 2014 occupational incident surveillance data from nearly 30 U.S. hospitals, when an employee experiences a splash or splatter of blood or body fluid (e.g. blood or bloody urine) into the eye they are only wearing eye-appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) 3.5 percent of the time.

Heather Punke, Becker's Infection Control & Clinical Quality
According to a Vital Signs report from the CDC, roughly 7 in 10 patients with sepsis had used healthcare services frequently or had chronic conditions that required frequent medical care. This represents an opportunity for healthcare providers to improve sepsis prevention and treatment.

Einav Keet, Contagion Live
As the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria leads to higher rates of life-threatening infections from pathogens such Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), researchers are increasingly looking to probiotic treatment as an important part of fighting infections.

Julie Steenhuysen and Letitia Stein, Reuters
Florida officials on Tuesday announced the first case of Zika transmitted by mosquitoes in Pinellas County, located some 265 miles (425 km) from Miami, where the first locally transmitted U.S. cases were reported.

Healthcare Facilities Today
Focusing on key areas can give a healthcare facility's infection prevention efforts a boost, according to an article on the Outpatient Surgery website.

Rodger Dean Duncan, Forbes
"If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less."

Joni S. Naugle, Reading Eagle
Business leaders are as varied as my childhood box of crayons.

Make yourself indispensable and advance your career! Plan your education for 2016. Visit AHE’s brand-new 2016 ENGAGE site to learn more about educational courses, podcasts, webinars, and events.

The designation of AHE Fellow (FAHE) recognizes current AHE members for reaching the highest level of education and achievement in both the Association and in the environmental services field. Only presented to Certified Healthcare Environmental Services Professionals (CHESP), FAHE status is given to active members who have excelled in specific areas and have submitted an acceptable, original, unpublished paper on a current aspect of environmental services.

We need YOU! AHE is gathering input from environmental services departments across the country to identify baseline staffing productivity standards. The results of this data gathering will be used in building staffing models and providing metrics for environmental services directors. You can be a key player in identifying and establishing these important staffing criteria for our industry.

EXCHANGE 2016 will be held on September 25-28, at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, PA. This year, EXCHANGE attendees can look forward to:
• Certified Healthcare Environmental Services Technician (CHEST) Pre-Conference Workshop
• Certificate of Mastery in Infection Prevention for Environmental Services (CMIP) Pre-Conference Workshop
• Infection Prevention, Environmental Cleaning, Leadership, Sustainability, Outbreaks and other sessions
• Extended Sessions
• Healthcare Marketplace

Celebrate your team during Environmental Services Week, September 11-17, 2016.

AHE has started this initiative to encourage professionals in the field to begin, or continue to refer to the departments and the personnel caring for the healthcare environment as environmental services professionals rather than as housekeepers, janitors and custodians. The staff and management teams responsible for maintaining the clinical environment of care require different skills and competencies from those needed in the commercial cleaning and general maintenance industry and it's time we address this critical distinction.

Please help us redefine healthcare environmental services!

The Association for the Healthcare Environment’s diverse membership includes environmental services professionals from many different backgrounds, including international members. Here, we feature three perspectives on the global scope of environmental services and what AHE has to offer for members in any country.

The Value of Training; an interview with Patrick Covington, T-CHEST