Veterinary Clinic Cleaning: What a Regular Cleaner Should Cover

A vet clinic is a medical practice with extra problems. It has consult rooms, treatment rooms, sharps and clinical waste like any clinic. It also has fur, mud, urine, anxious animals, and a few diseases that survive on a floor for months and shrug off the disinfectants most cleaners carry.

That makes the regular clean of a vet clinic its own job. Here is what it should cover, and where it differs from the cleaning of a GP clinic.

Who does what

In most vet clinics, the nurses and staff do the cleaning that happens between patients: wiping down the consult table, cleaning up after an accident in the waiting room, cleaning kennels when an animal goes home, and the clinical cleaning in surgery and isolation.

The contract cleaner does the scheduled clean, usually after the clinic closes: floors, surfaces, toilets, staff areas and waste, across the whole building. Some clinics also have the cleaner do a deeper clean of wards and kennels on a set day.

Getting that split in writing is the most important part of the contract. If the scope says "clean the clinic" and the nurses assume the cleaner is doing the kennels, the kennels don't get cleaned.

What the regular clean should cover

Reception and waiting room

This is where the clinic is judged, and where most of the dirt comes in on paws.

Floors swept or vacuumed and mopped with disinfectant, paying attention to the entrance and around the seats.
Seats, counter, door handles and the payment terminal cleaned and disinfected.
Glass doors and windows at dog-nose height.
The scales: platform cleaned and disinfected.
Retail shelving dusted, if the clinic sells food or products.

Consult rooms

Floors, including under and behind the consult table.
Bench surfaces, sinks and taps, door handles and light switches.
Bins emptied and relined.
The consult table itself, if the scope includes it. Many clinics prefer staff to keep doing it between patients and have the cleaner do it at the end of the day.

Treatment areas, wards and kennels

These depend most on the clinic's own procedures.

Floors and floor drains cleaned and disinfected.
Kennel and cage exteriors, doors and the walls around them, where the scope includes them.
Empty kennels cleaned only where the clinic asks, and never one with an animal in it.
The cleaner stays out of surgery and isolation unless there is a written procedure for those rooms, agreed with the clinic.

Toilets, staff room and laundry area

Toilets cleaned and restocked.
Staff kitchen and lunch room, including the fridge handle and microwave.
The floor of the laundry area. Washing the clinic's towels and bedding is normally a staff job.

Disinfectants that work

This is where vet clinics differ most from other clinics.

Canine parvovirus is very hardy. It can survive in the environment for months, and it is not reliably killed by quaternary ammonium products, which are the base of many general-purpose disinfectants. Feline panleukopenia virus behaves in the same way. A clinic that only uses a "kills 99.9% of germs" spray may not be killing the things it most needs to.

Products that are effective against parvovirus include diluted bleach, accelerated hydrogen peroxide and potassium peroxymonosulfate, used at the concentration and contact time on the label. The clinic usually chooses its disinfectants, and the cleaner should use the clinic's products, at the clinic's dilutions, in the areas the clinic specifies.

Two more things to check:

The label claims. Disinfectants sold for animal and veterinary use in Australia are generally regulated by the APVMA, while hospital-grade disinfectants for human health are listed with the TGA. Either way, the label should show the organisms the product is effective against and the contact time it needs. We explained how to read one in reading a hospital-grade disinfectant label.
Clean first, then disinfect. Disinfectant doesn't work on a floor still covered in fur, mud or organic matter. The surface is cleaned first, then disinfected and left wet for the contact time.

Animals also come into contact with floors and surfaces in a way people don't. Products should be rinsed or left to dry as the label says, and the clinic should know what is being used.

Sharps and clinical waste

Vet clinics produce sharps and clinical waste just like medical practices, and the same rule applies: clinical staff handle what goes into sharps containers and clinical waste bags. The cleaner handles everything around them. The cleaner never opens, empties or presses down a sharps container, and reports an overfull container or a loose sharp the same night.

Waste rules are set by each state's environment protection authority, and animal carcasses and anatomical waste have their own collection arrangements, which are the clinic's to manage with its waste contractor. We set out the split for Victorian clinics in clinical waste and sharps: what your cleaner handles. The same split works in a vet clinic in any state.

Fur, odour and drains

Fur gets everywhere, including into vacuums that aren't up to it. The cleaner's equipment should cope with heavy fur, and filters should be cleaned often.

Odour in a vet clinic usually comes from floor drains, the bases of kennels, the joins between floor and wall, and bins. Masking it with fragrance doesn't work, and strong scents bother animals. Regular cleaning of drains and edges, and bins emptied and cleaned, deals with the cause.

Cleaning safely around animals

The regular clean usually happens after hours, but some animals stay overnight in wards. The cleaner should know which rooms have animals in them, stay out of any room they are told to, keep doors and gates closed, and never let an animal out of a kennel. A cleaner who is nervous of dogs needs to say so before their first night, not after.

Writing the scope

A vet clinic scope should list each room, what the cleaner does in it, how often, which products to use, and what is staff-only. Our clinic cleaning policy and schedule post sets out a format that works, and the allied health clinic cleaning post covers shared and sessional rooms.

Our cleaners sign in and out of every visit on our app inside a geofence around the clinic, with a photo, so you can see the clean happened. If something is missed, you raise it in our client portal and follow it through to the fix.

If you'd like to talk through cleaning at your clinic, ask for a quote or read how we work with clinics on our medical and childcare cleaning page.