How Flooring Impacts Medical Office Cleaning

Posted on December 11, 2017

When operating a medical office, hygiene is one of your foremost priorities. Medical office hygiene and sanitation plays a crucial role in many decisions, from the layout of your office, to the protocols practiced by your staff, to the medical office cleaning vendor that you depend on.

Medical office hygiene also plays a crucial role in choosing the right type of flooring for your facility. As the medical office cleaning specialists at Jan-Pro® can tell you, the type of flooring in your medical office has a big impact on the risk posed by bacteria and viruses in your workplace.

Choosing Flooring Medical Offices

These days, you’ll encounter all sorts of different flooring types in medical offices. But some of these flooring types are better for medical office hygiene than others.

The biggest concern when choosing flooring for a medical facility is how easy it is for bacteria to get trapped in seams, fibers, or other areas. Carpeting, for instance, can be a poor choice because of how easily bacteria can hide away and breed in the fibers. Other flooring types (like wood, veneer, or certain types of vinyl) have cracks where bacteria can easily hide away from cleaners.

Because of these concerns, the best types of flooring for medical spaces tend to be hard surfaces with few seams. Seamless floors offer no areas where bacteria can hide, making them easy to clean and sterilize.

The three most common types of low-seam and seamless flooring are:

  • Sheet Vinyl. Sheet vinyl has few seams and uses heat-bonded rubber or chemical bonding to seal seams where they exist. This creates a near-seamless surface that is easy to keep sterile.
  • Epoxy Flooring. Epoxy flooring is installed over concrete floors and bonds with concrete to create a flush, seamless surface, making it easy to sterilize.
  • Rubber Flooring. As with epoxy flooring, rubber flooring creates a single, seamless surface that is easy to clean and highly damage resistant.

All three of these flooring types are supported by evidence-based research into healthcare facility hygiene, making them smart choices for any medical office.

Medical Office Hygiene & Floors

If you have low-seam or seamless flooring in your medical office, you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to workplace hygiene. But even if you have a different type of flooring in your office, there are steps you can take to make your workplace a more hygienic place.

Many of those steps are included in Jan-Pro’s MedMetrix® suite of services for medical office cleaning. MedMetrix® includes protocols for all types of flooring, including the use of high-performance HEPA-filter vacuums, flat-mopping with microfiber materials, and the use of our EnviroShield® system for total disinfection of all surfaces, including fibrous materials like carpeting.

Bring the MedMetrix® advantage to your medical office. Contact your local JAN-PRO® today for a FREE medical office cleaning estimate.