Dental Practice Cleaning: What CQC Inspectors Expect

A practice manager buys cleaning differently from an office manager. The office manager wants a tidy room. The practice manager is buying part of an evidence file, because a regulator can turn up and test the state of the building.

That changes how a dental contract in Uxbridge is priced and scheduled compared with a floor of desks, and it is what this page covers.

The standard your cleaner is working to

What does dental practice cleaning have to cover?

Everything the practice uses, including the rooms outside the surgery. Every dental practice in England has to be registered with the Care Quality Commission, and HTM 01-05 puts cleanliness and infection control among the registration requirements a provider has to meet. That wording is the 2013 document's. The enforceable duties a practice is held to today sit in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014: regulation 15 on premises and equipment, and regulation 12(2)(h), which requires the registered person to assess the risk of, and prevent, detect and control the spread of, infections. Reception, the decontamination room, the staff area and the corridor all fall inside that.

An inspection tests registration on an ongoing basis, and the environment is the part an inspector sees first.

Why the schedule counts as evidence

The CQC publishes a numbered series of mythbusters for dental providers. Number 38, on infection prevention and control, has a paragraph aimed straight at cleaning contractors. It says a contractor should have a schedule of general cleaning, that the schedule should include the cleaning frequency of specific areas, fixtures and fittings, and that this covers high frequency touch items such as keyboards, telephones, door handles and light switches.

Treat that paragraph as a document request. An inspector asking how reception gets cleaned wants to see a frequency written down, and "someone does it when it needs doing" leaves them with nothing to read. The paragraph sets no size threshold and makes no exception for a smaller practice.

What HTM 01-05 says about the room itself

Cleaning after each session

Most people know HTM 01-05 for its decontamination chapters. Chapter 6 is the one that applies to a cleaner. It says the patient treatment area should be cleaned after every session using disposable cloths or clean microfibre materials, even if the area appears uncontaminated.

Two things follow. A surgery that looks fine still gets cleaned, because appearance is not the trigger. And a practice running morning and afternoon sessions needs a clean in the middle of its day, which an evening visit from a contractor cannot cover.

Daily floors, weekly blinds

HTM 01-05 then puts cupboard doors, other exposed surfaces such as dental inspection light fittings, and floor surfaces on a daily interval, and it says this includes floors distant from the dental chair. So the corridor and the waiting room are on the daily list too.

A weekly interval covers window blinds, accessible ventilation fittings and other accessible surfaces such as shelving and radiators. In a building where nobody has written these frequencies down, those are the items that can go a year without attention.

The frequencies on one page

Every row below comes from the sources listed at the top of this page. It is the skeleton of the schedule an inspector asks to see, and it is the part a contractor should be able to produce without being prompted.

The last row is the one to watch. The CQC asks for a frequency against those four items and leaves the number to you, so a schedule that lists them without saying how often they are done has answered only half the question.

Materials, storage and who goes where

Why cleaning materials should stay in their own rooms

HTM 01-05 treats the materials used in clinical and decontamination areas as separate from general cleaning materials, and expects cleaning equipment to be stored outside patient care areas. In a small practice that is a real constraint. You need a cupboard for it, and a contractor who does not wheel one trolley from the surgery to the staff kitchen.

The document also points practices at the national colour coding scheme for cleaning materials and equipment in primary care medical and dental premises. Its phrasing is mild: the scheme "may be useful". Colour coding is a sensible way to make the separation visible, but HTM 01-05 does not make it a rule.

The briefing is part of the requirement

HTM 01-05 says cleaning staff should be briefed on the special measures to be observed in cleaning patient care areas or rooms used for decontamination, and that in some instances full training of personnel will be needed. That sentence is why a clinical clean costs and works differently from a general one. It also means the briefing should have a record behind it, and records are what an evidence file is made of. You can leave a briefed team in a treatment room after hours. Leaving an unbriefed one there is a risk.

The bin round is where it goes wrong

Two streams that must not meet

The main risk in this part of the job is waste going into the wrong container because nobody told the person carrying it which container was which. That is a briefing failure more than a cleaning one.

What a practice manager should ask a contractor

Ask for the schedule first, before price or references. If a contractor cannot show a document with rooms down one side and frequencies down the other, they cannot support the evidence the practice is graded on, however clean the building looks on the day.

Then ask how the team is briefed, where materials are stored, and what happens on a day when a session overruns. The answers will tell you whether you are talking to a clinical cleaner or a general one.

Crystal Clear Cleans works in this sector in Uxbridge, and cleaners are DBS checked and insured. Hours run from 6am to 10pm, seven days a week, so a clean between sessions or before the first patient is workable. Check the parking too. Where a practice sits near business bays, Hillingdon says the most common operating times are 8am to 6.30pm, Monday to Friday, and that outside the operating hours anyone can park in a business bay. A clean that starts after the bays stop operating needs no business permit, though the sign at the bay is the authority.

How the contract itself is set up, including the written specification, keys and alarms and changing the spec later, is on our office and commercial cleaning page, and the office cleaning guide for Uxbridge covers the parking and trade waste rules in more depth. Send the room list and your session pattern through the quote form and we will build the schedule around them.