Enhancing the quality management of hospital environmental surfaces through the application of a multidisciplinary...

Nosocomial infections have become one of the major causes of mortality among hospitalized patients. To improve the quality of cleaning and disinfection for hospital environmental surfaces, we conducted a multidisciplinary team (MDT) intervention study with a non-randomized control group in a general hospital in China. The MDT comprised members with educational backgrounds in nursing, clinical medicine, public health, or laboratory science. Fluorescent labeling and microbiological sampling were used to evaluate the cleaning levels of environmental surfaces. A questionnaire was employed to assess cleaners' knowledge awareness, cleaners' misconduct was examined via on-site inspection, and detection of multi-drug resistant organisms and calculation of hospital-acquired infection (HAI) rate were also conducted. After MDT intervention, cleaning levels were significantly improved (e.g., total cleaning rate was increased from 66.75 to 82.10%, P < 0.001), cleaners' knowledge awareness was enhanced (total qualified rate was increased from 51.61 to 83.15%, P < 0.01), misconduct rate was reduced (from 38.48 to 10.43%, P < 0.001), and detection rates of multi-drug resistant organisms and the HAI rate (from 1.29 to 0.88%, P < 0.01) were both significantly reduced. Our study demonstrates that the MDT model shows promising potential in the management of cleaning and disinfection in hospital environmental surfaces.