I'm an experienced highly qualified Early Years Educator and at work today at a creche I spent approx 3 hours deep cleaning as per current regs - I think this is neither sustainable nor desirable AIBU

[Germolenequeen]

AS ABOVE

wagtail,

Not much point in cleaning while the patient is in the room. PPE don and doff and room cleaning and air bridge, where appropriate, happens before and after patient occupies the room.

It does sound crap for you, I agree! Sympathies.

NGL, I only clicked on this thread because in the Active Conversations box it reads I'm an experienced highly qualified Earl

“2020 doesn’t care about your CV” @BillBaileysBum I snorted tea out of my nose. I might love you.

@Zilla1

wagtail,

Not much point in cleaning while the patient is in the room. PPE don and doff and room cleaning and air bridge, where appropriate, happens before and after patient occupies the room.

You've completely missed wagtail's point

We’re all having to do extra stuff this year. Suck it up, Buttercup. 2020 doesn’t care about your CV.

I wouldn't have put it like this because I don't think YABU to hate it at all. But... it does sort of come down to this. It's a national emergency. People have to do stuff they wouldn't normally do. Can your setting afford to hire cleaners to do it instead? If not then you're all going to have to muck in.

Cleaning is a preventative measure but the point is that it doesn't need to be a deep clean. Normal cleaning more often. You don't need a full time cleaner. Its going to be a lot more work and we will need to be creative about that but it shouldn't be another full time job.

I'm worried about all the chemicals here if there is constant cleaning going on.

We have mainly hard flooring, its got to be our most touched surface. Obviously we have tables and trays and all sorts but the little ones take toys down there, they lie on it, roll on it, sit on it...if we are in panic mode about door handles shouldn't we be washing and disinfecting the floor several times a day? How would that even work when our setting is a single room? What would the authorities say if we were all outside and a child had an accident while someone was inside washing the floor?

We've got to interpret this and be sensible. Hours and hours of daily cleaning unless the setting is absolutely massive is just impossible and honestly a bit daft.

I laughed out loud at "2020 doesn't care about your CV"... I wouldn't have put is so bluntly, but it is so true.

ItsSummer, please enlighten me how I've missed Wagtail's point -

Wagtail said "I would be beyond pissed off if i went for a gp appointment and DURING the appointment the gp cleaned the room whilst i was sat there and BECAUSE SHE WAS CLEANING she couldnt take my blood pressure or look in my ear and then just sent me off and the end of my 10 minuted."

I said "Not much point in cleaning while the patient is IN the room. PPE don and doff and room cleaning and air bridge, where appropriate, happens BEFORE and after patient occupies the room".

@Streamingbannersofdawn

Exactly. It's the same guidance as for childminders. Do people think childminders in sole charge of up to 6 DC are spending 3 hours a day cleaning? Or they should be given funds for a cleaner?

No. They're adhering to the guidelines by being a bit more stringent and frequent with cleaning. That's all that needs to be done.

There's a piece on the BBC today about people who think they are too good to be doing cleaning.

Your job is to do whatever your employer asks you to do. Get on with it and stop whinging.

I'm highly qualified, doesn't stop me answering the phone when it is needed. On return to the office, I fully expect to be mucking in with the regular cleaning. If my company has to employ a full time cleaner, it would have to lose a couple of junior tech staff. That's far more problematic than some of us having to do cleaning.

That was there yesterday and it's an interesting interpretation of the article!

Your job is to do whatever your employer 'reasonably' asks you to do. Imo, unless you have been trained and given the proper protective equipment and know all the protocols around how to uses the chemicals, it isn't reasonable. If it affects your ability or time to do the job you are paid for, it isn't reasonable.

"Exactly. It's the same guidance as for childminders. Do people think childminders in sole charge of up to 6 DC are spending 3 hours a day cleaning? Or they should be given funds for a cleaner?"

We were at the beginning.
The Government guidance was patchy to the extreme and we were having to scrabble around for any information we could. I sat in on webinar training that told us to clean, disinfect, wipedown, bleach every single surface, remove soft furnishings, remove toys... I was spending hours every day after the kids had gone, cleaning everything. And then the advice was to strip off, put clothes immediately into the washing machine and to shower myself.

The guidance has trickled out, continually updated, often contradictory. It's hardly surprising that settings are completely confused about what is needed and what is not. The driving force behind all this deep cleaning are the schools and the parents. I suspect that the schools' guidance says something different to ours.

Currently, the guidance says we only need to do the deep cleaning - basically the regime we were originally following - if we have a case. So I'd go back to your managers, Op. It's likely they're still working from an older guidance document.

The hand washing routine mentioned earlier may work fine for school children, but Op is Early Years: toddlers aren't so easy to regiment.

@jolokoy

It does sound crap for you, I agree! Sympathies.

NGL, I only clicked on this thread because in the Active Conversations box it reads I'm an experienced highly qualified Earl

Me too!

Have you even bothered to read the thread, MintyMabel? That is not what the Op is saying!

Maybe that will teach people to at least clean the toilets after their number 2 as they notice the effort that the cleaners make to remove people's filth.

tanith the schools guidance is ultra vague. says something (and has done for ages) about 'more regular and frequent cleaning, especially of touch points, eg door handles) At my place, this is interpreted as the same teenage cleaner wandering around occasionally with his dirty cloth
They have kept the guidance on cleaning vague in education because there is no funding.

And is the OP saying that there is no value in the child care offering in the setting and it is unsafe for the children, which is how the analogy with the GP setting would work?

Zilla1 - yes i know! But in OPs case she is still supposed to be actively delivering the early years curriculumn and looking after the welfare of her 8/13? children whilst silmultaneously actively deep cleaning. So all the 'im a hcp and i clean too so suck it up' seems a bit unfair. Yes they do clean. But presumably by seeing less patients not by cleaning whilst you assess and treat the patient. And in both instances its the user that is sucking up (the child or the patient that cant get an appointment)
But its a moot point as i really do think if they sit down with the guidelines and reasses it will improve.

@Iwalkinmyclothing 😂😂😂

I laughed out loud at "2020 doesn't care about your CV"... I wouldn't have put is so bluntly, but it is so true.

It's got fuck all to do with her CV and everything to do with small children not being given the attention and care that they are due because staff are having to clean instead. Nobody should be sucking that up.

Why was the op expected to do three hours cleaning? Was every member of staff also expected to do three hours cleaning or was op the only one doing it?

I think the answer will decide whether they Abu or anbu.

If it was only op well why wasn't everyone else chipping in? Presumably if they all helped them op cleaning say for 30 minutes (based on six staff doing it) isn't excessive.

If all six staff were doing three hours cleaning then that's ridiculous.

@MintyMabel

There's a piece on the BBC today about people who think they are too good to be doing cleaning.

Your job is to do whatever your employer asks you to do. Get on with it and stop whinging.

I'm highly qualified, doesn't stop me answering the phone when it is needed. On return to the office, I fully expect to be mucking in with the regular cleaning. If my company has to employ a full time cleaner, it would have to lose a couple of junior tech staff. That's far more problematic than some of us having to do cleaning.

Would you need to lose them though? Maybe if it's a small and fairly new firm, but I'm willing to bet that if it is a larger or small but successful one the financial gap could be bridged by the people at the top taking a salary cut. Certainly Tesco could afford cleaners easily- they just don't want to.

The idea that people at the top of firms 'need' or worse 'deserve' to earn far more than the employees is so pervasive in society that it doesn't seem to occur to many ordinary employees that actually they are doing this extra work purely to ensure the right people stay rich and not for some heroic, socially beneficial reason.

The fact that the government are not releasing money to schools, one of the few places where the cuts-at-the-top strategy wouldn't instantly solve the crisis because of the relatively low wage given even to SLT*, perfectly illustrates this. At a time when jobs are disappearing in their thousands this would be a great way to help as many people as possible into employment. But it might mean someone already on huge wages pays more tax and we can't have the rich getting poorer...

*Yes, compared to a shelf stacker teachers earn well, but compared to the CEO of Tesco they might as well be living in a cardboard box somewhere.

I think for many of us cleaning has become part of the job for now. I'm a GO and if seeing patients in the surgery have to wipe down their chair in the waiting room clean door handles and clean all stuff in my room in contact with them after they leave. The cleaners are just here on an evening and having them pop in and out of rooms puts extra people at risk