Jaime Morgan, Health Facilities Management
Environmental services (ES) departments may not always be thought of as revenue-producing entities but, according to Todd Wilkening, CEO of FMadvantage LLC, there are ways ES managers can contribute to the bottom line outside of cost-saving measures.

Gregory Gicewicz and Carol McLay, Facility Care
It is an unsafe practice for healthcare laundries to return unused linens on exchange carts from the hospital to the laundry plant, where those same unused textiles — without being reprocessed — are then topped off with clean linens and returned to the hospital.

Henry Powderly, Healthcare Finance News
Lawmakers in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday sent a letter to acting Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services acting administrator Andy Slavitt to delay releasing the latest quarterly Hospital Compare rankings over concerns that the methodology used to rate hospitals fails to account for a patient pool's social and income-level standings.

Todd Wilkening, Facility Care
Having served on both sides of the buy-sell equation — 35 years as a healthcare facility manager (FM) and more than 10 years as a consultant — I’ve noticed that there appears to be a number of benefits lost when owners (buyers) and contractors and vendors (sellers) neglect to develop the customer relationship as a partnership.

Amber Dickinson, Facility Executive
Facility managers have the challenging task of procuring all the elements necessary to maintain and operate their facilities.

MedicalXpress
New research demonstrates that the six-step hand-hygiene technique recommended by the World Health Organization is superior to a three-step method suggested by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in reducing bacteria on healthcare workers' hands.

John M. Boyce, Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control
Experts agree that careful cleaning and disinfection of environmental surfaces are essential elements of effective infection prevention programs.

Nancy Jenkins, American Laundry News
It’s the "hot-button" issue of the decade—superbugs and how to effectively fight and control outbreaks of infection in healthcare and hospitality environments.

Infection Control Today
A simulation of how the so-called superbug carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) might spread among healthcare facilities found that coordinated efforts prevented more than 75 percent of the often-severe infections that would have otherwise occurred over a five-year period.

Infection Control Today
According to this week’s FluView report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), flu activity continues to decrease, but is still elevated overall nationally in the United States.

Laura Dyrda, Becker’s Infection Control & Clinical Quality
Rigid containers and sterilization wraps are two major sterilization packaging types for sterile instruments used in the healthcare setting.

Christian Bonilla, Quartz
Most people who are good at school follow a pretty straightforward strategy: study hard, get good grades, repeat.

Mark Murphy, Forbes
Being a boss is no easy job, and it’s pretty common to wonder, "How am I really doing?"

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.

Plan your education for 2016. Visit AHE’s brand-new 2016 ENGAGE site to learn more about educational courses, podcasts, webinars, and events.

To acknowledge the ongoing and outstanding sustainability efforts of healthcare facilities - and environmental service departments in particular - the AHE presents the Environmental Sustainability Certificate Program. This program not only provides guidance on efficient, effective and value-added environmentally sustainable healthcare operations, but also provides it in such a way that is achievable within all budgets. It is part of the AHE’s overall sustainability initiative, which includes ongoing development of sustainability programs, publications and educational opportunities.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016 11:00 AM PDT / 2:00PM EDT
The Green Electronics Council and Healthcare Sustainability Roadmap, a program of the American Hospital Association, recently released a new instructional document titled The Lifecycle Management of Electronics from Procurement to Disposal.

Join the Sustainability Roadmap’s Laura Faye, Practice Greenhealth’s Lauren Kleinman, and Green Electronic Council’s Andrea Desimone for an introduction to this document, as well as an overview of the American Hospital Association’s Performance Improvement Measures (how-to guides) and Practice Greenhealth’s Healthier Hospitals Initiative and Smarter Purchasing Challenge.

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:
• Preconference Workshop
• CHEST Preconference Workshop
• CMIP Preconference Workshop
• Micro Sessions
• Extended Sessions
• Healthcare Marketplace

If interested in contributing to EXPLORE by authoring a best-practices article, email Russell Underwood, EXPLORE editor, for more information. The magazine covers all aspects relevant to health care environmental services professionals.

The award recognizes and celebrates best practices in cleaning and caring for the environment. It was designed to highlight the outstanding achievements of a leading-edge environmental services team in maintaining high levels of performance in cleaning, disinfecting, infection prevention, environmental sustainability and stewardship, use of technology, patient satisfaction, education, and training in critical areas.

Joe Tye, EXPLORE magazine

Brenda Marks, BN, MBA, Explore magazine