Jamie Morgan, Health Facilities Management
The strict lines that once separated back-of-the-house operations from patient-facing roles is a bit blurrier in today’s health care landscape.

Ayla Ellison, Becker's Hospital Review
CMS has issued its inpatient prospective payment systems final rule for fiscal year 2017, which does away with the two-midnight rule's inpatient pay cuts.

Mickey Crowe, CleanLink
A reader writes: "We have converted 100 percent to microfiber cloths for all our custodial operations. Is it practical to launder the cloths in separate mesh bags that are tagged so that the cloths from each area go back to that area?"

Paige Minemyer, Fierce Healthcare
Patients who visit Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital in Detroit for the first time may think they entered a luxury resort instead of a 191-bed hospital.

Sandee LaMotte, CNN
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an unprecedented travel warning Monday, advising pregnant women and their partners not to travel to a small community just north of downtown Miami, where Zika is actively circulating.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Local governments and mosquito control programs often use an integrated mosquito management (IMM) or integrated vector management (IVM) approach to control mosquitoes.

Mary Rechtoris, Becker's Infection Control & Clinical Quality
To prevent infection in ambulatory surgery centers, The CORE Institute, the Joint Commission, the CDC and other healthcare organizations will collaborate on an initiative on infection prevention and control in ASCs.

Chris Dall, CIDRAP
In an acknowledgment that the world is in serious need of new antibiotics to fight increasingly drug resistant bacteria, US and UK officials have announced a new, multimillion-dollar effort to boost antibiotic research and development.

Heather Punke, Becker's Infection Control & Clinical Quality
The spread of some diseases during epidemics relies greatly on human behavior, and researchers from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico discovered that replacing sick workers — be they healthcare workers, teachers or first responders — with healthy ones fuels the spread of disease.

Josh Barney, University of Virginia
A new, epidemic strain of C. difficile is proving alarmingly deadly, and new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine not only explains why but also suggests a way to stop it.

Dana Manciagli, San Francisco Business Times
Despite the many gains women have made over the years, a gender gap in leadership still remains.

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.

This new certification for environmental services professionals covers all aspects of a frontline worker’s typical tasks and accountabilities. A Train-the-Trainer (TTT) model is employed to minimize costs while maximize reach and impact. In this program frontline staff/technicians, trainers and managers will be trained on the curriculum, competencies and proficiencies required to certify technicians. This is a 3-day training session runs from September 22-24, 2016 (TH, F, S) at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

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 Sheryl S. Jackson

By Sheryl S. Jackson