Make yourself indispensable and advance your career! Plan your education for 2017. Visit AHE’s brand-new 2017 ENGAGE site to learn more about educational courses, podcasts, webinars, and events. And make sure to check out AHE's new EXPRESS Learning Courses. EXPRESS is a mobile learning platform that offers educational podcasts delivered by environmental services and infection prevention thought leaders. You asked for learning opportunities that require less of a time commitment and we delivered!

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!

Ed Sullivan, facilitiesnet.com
Most companies have a process for reviewing the performance of employees, to gauge whether the individual is meeting the needs of the organization.

facilitiesnet.com
Illnesses occur year-round, but certain illness-causing germs like the common cold, norovirus and influenza peak during the winter months when we spend more time indoors in close quarters.

Bill Donohue, Outpatient Surgery
Mobile robots hunt down and destroy even the hardiest of multidrug-resistant organisms.

CleanLink
According to some estimates, any one person can come into direct and indirect contact with floors as much as 50 times every day.

Rami Sommerstein, MD, Medscape
In the past, there were reports that hand-hygiene compliance improved after mandatory glove use was eliminated from contact precautions.

Infection Control Today
According to the CDC's FluView report for the week ending Jan. 14, 2017 (week 2), flu activity continues to increase in the United States.

Stephanie Soucheray, CIDRAP
Experts say the United States could well see H5N2 or another strain of avian flu in poultry again this year, and although federal officials have implemented steps in the past 2 years to better prepare for outbreaks, many questions remain about how the virus infects poultry and spreads from farm to farm.

Svetlana Whitener, Forbes
How can leaders get ready to work with Generations Y and Z?

Marshall Goldsmith, CNBC
The ever-increasing presence of knowledge workers (people who know more about what they are doing than their boss does) presents challenges to modern-day leaders that their counterparts in years gone by were not called to address.

By Walter Vernon

By Cindy Nuesslein, RN, MBA, FACHE

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 Certificate of Mastery in Infection Prevention for Environmental Services Professionals (CMIP) is a robust certificate program which requires online pre-work and an in-person training session, along with an optional post-session capstone project/assessment. This intensive 30-hour certificate program provides Environmental Services professionals with the requisite knowledge to meet the CMS requirements for a "trained" professional in infection prevention and control specific to the clinical environment of care.