Case Study — Medical

A Gordon Specialist Suite, Audit-Ready in Six Weeks

The Situation

The client is a two-specialist practice above the retail strip on the Pacific Highway in Gordon — consulting rooms, a minor procedures room, pathology collection point and a shared waiting area, with roughly 60 patients moving through on a busy day. The identity is anonymised at the practice's request; the details below are as delivered.

Their incumbent cleaner was a generalist. Floors were mopped and bins emptied, but there was no documented scope, no chemical register, no dwell-time discipline, and the practice manager was fielding re-clean requests from nursing staff roughly twice a week. An upcoming accreditation review made the gap urgent: the practice could not evidence its cleaning at all.

What We Changed

• Wrote a room-by-room clinical scope with the practice manager — every surface, product and frequency documented
• Switched all wet-area and clinical surface work to TGA-approved hospital-grade disinfectant at labelled dilution and dwell time
• Introduced colour-coded microfibre separation across clinical, bathroom, kitchen and general zones
• Assigned a consistent two-person crew, both police-checked and infection-control trained, with a named supervisor
• Added a 25-minute lunchtime turnover service for the waiting room and patient bathroom
• Stood up the compliance folder: per-visit signed logs, safety data sheets, chemical register, insurance and screening records

The Result

Six weeks in, nursing-staff re-clean requests had fallen from roughly two per week to zero, and they have stayed there through eight months of service. The accreditation review passed with the cleaning evidence accepted as presented — the folder went across the desk, and that section of the review was closed in minutes. The lunchtime turnover, initially a trial, became permanent after patient-facing staff reported the afternoon waiting room finally matched the morning one.

The contract runs month-to-month at standard clinical rates — no lock-in, reviewed against a monthly supervisor audit the practice manager receives with photos.

Why It Matters for Other Gordon Practices

Gordon's medical strip is full of practices cleaned adequately for an office and inadequately for a clinic. The difference is not effort — it is protocol and paperwork. If your practice cannot currently hand an assessor a cleaning evidence folder, that is the gap to close first. Our medical cleaning Gordon page details the full protocol, our cost guide covers budgets, and the same discipline extends to aged care and childcare settings.

How the Transition Ran, Week by Week

The switch itself was engineered not to disrupt a working clinic on the Pacific Highway. Week one was documentation only: walkthrough, photographs, the room-by-room scope drafted and signed off by the practice manager, and the compliance folder opened before a single surface was cleaned. Week two ran as a paid trial alongside the outgoing arrangement — evening cleans observed by the supervisor, dwell times checked with a stopwatch rather than assumed, and the first signed logs filed. From week three the crew ran solo, with the lunchtime turnover trialled and the chemical register and safety data sheets completed on site. The remaining weeks were refinement: two scope amendments raised by nursing staff were written in within a day of being requested, and the first monthly audit with photographs went to the practice manager at the end of week six — the same audit format the practice still receives today. At no point did the clinic close, shorten a session or ask patients to work around cleaners; the entire transition happened after the last appointment each evening, which is the only way a Gordon practice should ever have to change contractors.