Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1978 [PAGE 672]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

1978]

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

659

Income

proximately $35,000. Funds are available in the University Hospital Fund (should they be needed) to reimburse the Veterans Hospital. The vice president for administration concurs. I recommend approval. O n m o t i o n of Miss C o n l o n , t h i s r e c o m m e n d a t i o n w a s a p p r o v e d .

Contract for Hospital Housekeeping Management, Medical Center

(18) I n recent years, the rapidly growing size, technical complexity, cost, and utilization of hospitals have created a set of management problems unique to the hospital field. One of these problems is how best to assure that a hospital is cleaned properly at a reasonable cost. The University of Illinois Hospital is a large, technologically complicated, medically sophisticated institution. It contains such facilities as a transplant center, several kinds of intensive care units, including one for critically ill newborns, many laboratories, operating rooms, a large emergency service, etc. More than half a million people use and visit the hospital and clinics each year. Cleaning hospitals is now a highly developed specialty. Certain areas must be kept essentially free of bacteria. Expensive and complicated hospital equipment and furnishings must be cleaned at specific times in certain ways with specialized cleaning compounds and equipment, by specially trained housekeepers. During the past two years, the hospital administration has explored ways to improve hospital housekeeping. Three different firms have evaluated housekeeping services and have suggested alternatives to improve present practice. As a result of such study, several conclusions have been drawn: 1. Improvement in present hospital housekeeping is mandatory, particularly in view of the completion of the new hospital building. 2. Hospital housekeepers must be better trained, well supervised, and highly motivated. 3. T h e hospital must obtain better cleaning equipment and supplies, good ongoing training programs in hospital housekeeping, and an efficient and effective supervising program, to include constant monitoring of the effectiveness of housekeeping against modern scientific standards. 4. While the above-described equipment and programs, with the appropriate expenditure of time and funds, could be established "in house" by the hospital, they can be obtained more quickly and more economically from a firm specializing in the field. The use of specialized firms by contract has been proved successful worldwide and is now being employed by several large medical centers (e.g., Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Cook County Hospitals). The largest firm in business in the United States provides housekeeping services to about 570 hospitals, 24 of them in the Chicago area. With a large number of hospitals involved in a single system, it becomes possible to develop on a shared basis major support services which no single hospital is capable of providing. Such services include effective training and personnel development programs, research and development in scheduling techniques and job performance standards, product research and development, housekeeping technique research and development, and the provision of the latest and best housekeeping equipment. Moreover, the contractor has the capability of drawing on a large management staff in order to find the most appropriate individual with the skills and personality attributes requisite to the effective operation of the hospital's large housekeeping department. Finally, there is a strong profit incentive, which dictates the provision of satisfactory service in order to maintain a contractual relation with a hospital.