Matt Poe, American Laundry News
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires that almost every employer in the United States pay minimum wage for all hours worked and then pay overtime for hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a workweek.

REMI Network
The Canadian Association of Environmental Management (CAEM), along with Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, are now working on phase two of a study, which is examining how much time workers spend when cleaning different types of hospital rooms, and how they compare to Canadian and U.S. health agency benchmarks.

Jamie Morgan, Health Facilities Management
The Joint Commission has listed the five most challenging requirements among health care facilities for the first half of 2016.

Corinne Zudonyi, CleanLink
The term "Internet of Things" is relatively new, but it’s already being incorporated into many products and equipment.

Ed Cara, Medical Daily
There’s little to love about the noisy hand dryers that are increasingly part of our daily hand-washing routine, aside from their overall lower energy consumption compared to traditional paper towels. But are they actually worse for our hand hygiene?

Heather Punke, Becker's Infection Control & Clinical Quality
Most international standards for hand sanitizer used in healthcare settings do not take hand size into account when recommending how much hand sanitizer to use, but a new study in the American Journal of Infection Control says that shouldn't be the case.

Karen Weintraub, USA Today
Antibacterial soaps will soon disappear from store shelves under orders from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which said Friday that they provide no benefits over regular soap.

Heather Punke, Becker's Infection Control & Clinical Quality
As of Aug. 31, 2,722 Zika cases have been reported to the CDC by the 50 states and Washington, D.C. The mosquito-borne and sexually transmitted virus is much wider spread in the United States' territories, as a total of 14,110 cases have been reported to the CDC by American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Harvey Schachter, The Globe and Mail
For Jim Fisher, leadership is "the great human puzzle." As a leader, you must thoughtfully consider how to get people to go in the direction you want with energy and enthusiasm.

Hang Nguyen, San Diego Union Tribune
There are different ways to be a good business leader. One local executive coach focuses on respect.

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.

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.

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.

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!

By Mitch Birchfield

By John Scherberger