The Association for the Healthcare Environment (AHE), of the American Hospital Association, has announced the recipients of the 2015 Recognition Awards for excellence in caring for the environment, volunteer service, mentorship and environmental sustainability.

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.

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 (AHE) announced today that Key Source International is the third ever environmental services industry leader to be presented with AHE’s prestigious Innovation Award.

Healio
A technique using ultraviolet C light to clean hospital rooms reduced the incidence of Clostridium difficile infections by 25% among hematology-oncology patients and saved up to $1.5 million in health care costs in a single year, according to University of Pennsylvania researchers.

Aaron Hartung, Healthcare Facilities Today
rom cleanliness and accessibility to heavy wear, wayfinding and promoting a healing environment, hospitals face a unique, stringent set of challenges. The flooring is no exception.

Anuja Vaidya, Becker's Infection Control & Clinical Quality
The American Hospital Association's Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence initiative and the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare released a guide for hospitals focused on mitigating patient falls, according to an AHA News report.

Suzanna Hoppszallern, Beth Burmahl, and Jamie Morgan, Health Facilities Management
In response to increasing security risks and growing pressure from regulatory agencies, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a majority of hospitals have adopted aggressive training programs designed to de-escalate security situations before they erupt.

CleanLink
Many cleaning professionals have heard that a surface must be cleaned before applying a disinfectant. However, they might not know exactly why.

Louise-Marie Dembry, MD, MBA, MS, FACP, FSHEA, ADVANCE for NPs & PAs
Multidisciplinary teams are absolutely critical to effectively fighting the alarming rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Collaboration among physicians, pharmacists, nurses, environmental services and healthcare C-suite leaders has helped make important progress in this struggle against dangerous healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).

Kathryn Doyle, AOL News
If the previous occupant of a hospital bed received antibiotics, the next patient who uses that bed may be at higher risk for a severe form of infectious diarrhea, according to a new study.

Brian Zimmerman, Becker's Infection Control & Clinical Quality
Virologists and epidemiologists are keeping an eye on four viruses transmitted by traveling insects that have the potential to trigger future outbreaks, according to the Scientific American.

Infection Control Today
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced that it will pour $14 million into urgently needed research on the issue of superbugs, and steps to prevent, test for and understand antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Eric Oliver, Becker's Infection Control & Clinical Quality
The gold standard for measuring hand hygiene compliance, direct observation, is under fire, ContagionLive reports.

Ravin Jesuthasan and Marie S. Holmstrom, Harvard Business Review
As work itself is changing, some of the basic tenets of leadership development are being challenged.

Knowledge@Wharton
After years of teaching courses in management, Wharton professors Harbir Singh and Mike Useem realized something was missing from the traditional lessons on how to be an effective manager.

By Sheryl S. Jackson

By Mitch Birchfield

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.