The new National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2025 have been updated to include ambulances and other patient transport vehicles, and address the challenges in ambulance facilities.
Updated standards
As well as including ambulances within the new standards, they also emphasise the key points of the previous standards.
- A focus on a collaborative approach. The 2025 standards recognise that different staff groups are often responsible for cleaning different elements. Published ratings will reflect the cleanliness score for whole areas and not individual elements cleaned by separate parties.
- An emphasis has been placed on the displaying of star ratings. The new standards aim for transparency to assure patients, public and staff that cleaning compliance is being adhered to.
- The risk rating score categories have been increased, from 4 to 6. The expanded scoring allows departments to increase or decrease the risk rating in individual areas as needed.
- Efficacy audits have been detailed to widen the audit function. This means auditing the cleaning process as well as the cleaning outcome.
- A reminder on the flexibility of blending functional areas to help maximise resource allocation.
- Cleaning frequencies to be linked to each element to determine the cleaning frequencies for each functional risk area.
For full details of the new standards, visit: National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2025
Summary
The NHS has earned a high reputation for the cleanliness of its environments. These new standards intend to continue supporting the healthcare sector to maintain this as well as identifying opportunities for improvement.
Our fmfirst® Cleaning software was designed to meet the 2021 standards and is compliant with the new 2025 standards. Many of our clients begin their journey with us by purchasing fmfirst® Cleaning as this application is configured to the standards required to meet the National Cleaning Standards audit requirements. The guarantee our software brings around compliance is a huge selling point for teams who are juggling so many demands on their time.
Contact us today if you’d like to discover more about how fmfirst® Cleaning can help you demonstrate compliance to the new National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2025.
