Ronnie Scotland joined Clear Trace as our first ever franchisee in February 2019.  Since then he has been busy making himself an integral part of our growing team, looking after clients across the Yorkshire area.

To help you get to know Ronnie, we interviewed him on your behalf:

So Ronnie.  Tell us about your role at Clear Trace

I manage Clear Trace infection control cleaning contracts in the Yorkshire area.  We work with surgeries, health clinics, eye clinics and ambulance firms, making sure all equipment and working spaces are professionally cleaned to CQC inspection standards.

We are a close-knit team.  I’m very lucky to be working with well-trained cleaning staff who know what they are doing and work well together.

Have you always been involved with infection control?

No actually, I have spent a great deal of my career as an accountant in the oil and gas sector.  But I decided I wanted to try something new.  I find my background in managing numbers and people comes in extremely handy at Clear Trace.

I had tried my hand at running different franchises while I lived in the States – we were there 16 years – so when we came back to the UK it was an obvious move to follow that route in the UK.

Which other franchise opportunities have you tried?

While we were in the States I ran a sandwich brand franchise in Daytona Beach.  The perfect location, a great business.  But the company was so big, it could sometimes feel like you were just one of many people making the company grow.  I didn’t really feel like I knew what the overall strategy was, or could influence it much myself.

What was it about Clear Trace that attracted you?

This company is very organised, procedures are all set out to be followed.  That made it much easier for me to hit the ground running when I started up in February 2019.

But really it was meeting Adam Murfitt, the company founder that got me hooked on setting out with Clear Trace.  I liked his honesty and I could see from the way he described the business and its steady growth over the past few years that there was real integrity to his business strategy.

Now that I’m part of that, even though we are based in different areas of the country, it feels like we’re all in head office, pushing the company forward together.

What is the most rewarding part of your role?

When we speak with clients, you can tell that we are providing services of real personal value.  Clients trust us to take care of Infection control cleaning, something that is essential to patient health and a huge risk if not managed properly.

It’s so rewarding to know that our teams have taken a load of stress and work from someone’s working day, so they have been able to focus more on patient wellbeing.

You see it in the smiles on people’s faces when they go through a successful CQC review.  Then I think, we helped them do that.  Who wouldn’t feel proud of that?

To find out more about managing a Clear Trace franchise, get in touch with Adam Murfitt on 07957 592997.  Our Franchise Pack tells you everything you need to know.

If you would like more information about Clear Trace services, click here or call 01524 220225.

Clear Trace speak at National Radiographers’ Conference

The Care Quality Commission can shut you down for poor infection control

“Never do harm to anyone”

At the centre of the Hippocratic Oath lies a small sentence that his fundamental to our work at Clear Trace. As infection control specialists it is no surprise to us that the CQC take hygienic cleaning procedures so seriously. Any health care provider can be placed in special measures, or even closed, if the management team are not deemed to be consistently meeting their infection control obligations.

Defining ‘infection control’

At Clear Trace we look well beyond normal house-keeping and focus on destroying pathogenic micro-organisms that can often remain, even when an area looks visibly clean. Our processes represent a gold standard in infection control cleaning – we developed the standards ourselves and worked hard to gain the ISO stamp of approval.

Once we had that, we focused on making sure our cleaning teams were carrying out these procedures every step of the way, to maintain the levels of cleanliness our clients expect. This is so much easier now that our purpose-built infection control tracking software is in place and in use across the UK.

What gets in the way of effective infection control?

The working life of an Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Cleaning Technician can be a lonely one. Often our work is carried out after normal working hours when all the Medical staff, Radiographers or Ambulance staff have packed up and gone home.

Apart from being on site alone, the main disadvantage of this is not getting the opportunity to meet and chat with the users of the facilities we work on. This means we often miss out on the chance to explain what we do and see if it could be changed or improved to better deliver a clean and safe environment for our clients and their service users.

Working in industry silos is one of the worst ways to support joined-up working in the control of infection. If we don’t understand how clients work, and they don’t understand how we operate, things can get missed.

So when Clear Trace were asked to speak at a national Radiographers conference organised by a client who is one of the largest private healthcare providers in the UK, we welcomed the opportunity to meet people who use scanning and diagnostic equipment every day.

Improving infection control through collaborative working.

The most beneficial thing about working with Radiographers at the conference, was that we gained so much in terms of mutual understanding. Specialist medical staff are always under extreme time and resource pressure. The last thing they need is another thing to think about.

But in conversation, you could see that it was becoming clear to them, how fundamental hygienic cleaning is to overall service levels. If a patient were to leave with an increased risk of infection, we would all have failed in our duty.
As more and more opportunities arise to work collaboratively across health and care services, we can all strive for better standards in making sure infection control doesn’t slip through the cracks.

If you would like us to come and talk to your teams about simple ways to improve hygiene levels, please contact us.