Hiring a Cleaning Company for a Dental Office
Hiring a Cleaning Company for a Dental Office: Who Owns What, and What to Ask
Nearly every guide on hiring a cleaning company for a dental or medical office is written by a cleaning company, and it ends with a request for a quote. The advice stays general, ask about training, make sure they use a hospital-grade disinfectant, check references. None of that is wrong, it just doesn’t help an office manager tell a healthcare-grade cleaner from a janitorial service that added the word “medical” to its website. This guide isn’t selling a cleaning service. It covers what an office manager needs to know before signing a cleaning contract, starting with the part that causes the confusion in the first place, which is whose job is whose.
Who owns what
A dental office has two groups keeping it clean and safe, the practice’s own clinical staff and the cleaning contractor, and the rules for each come from different places.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) infection control guidance for dental settings splits surfaces into two kinds. Clinical contact surfaces are the ones touched during patient care, light handles, chair controls, switches, the counter where instruments get set down, and those are barrier-protected or cleaned and disinfected between patients with an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-registered hospital disinfectant. Housekeeping surfaces are floors, walls and sinks, and those usually need detergent and water, with a disinfectant when they’re contaminated. The CDC is also clear that cleaning comes before disinfection, a disinfectant doesn’t work through soil left on the surface. In practice, between-patient work belongs to clinical staff, because it happens all day while patients are in the chair, and the contractor handles housekeeping surfaces and the deeper work after hours. That’s the line, and a lot of the friction between offices and their cleaners comes from nobody putting it on paper.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) Bloodborne Pathogens Standard, 29 CFR 1910.1030, divides responsibility a second way. When a contractor’s employees work in your office, the contractor is their employer and owes them the general protections: bloodborne pathogen training at initial assignment and at least once a year, the hepatitis B vaccine offered within 10 working days of assignment, and medical follow-up after an exposure. The office, as the site where the hazard is, owes them the site-specific part, training on your office’s hazards and procedures, the personal protective equipment (PPE) for the work, and control of the exposure at its source. The standard applies wherever contact with blood is reasonably anticipated, so coverage depends on the actual tasks performed, not the job title, and a dental office contract should be written on the assumption that the cleaning staff are covered.
Put together, it looks like this.
| Task or surface | Practice staff | Cleaning contractor |
| Clinical contact surfaces (light handles, chair controls, switches, instrument counters) | Barrier or clean and disinfect between every patient | No |
| Housekeeping surfaces (floors, walls, sinks), including in operatories | No | Detergent and water, disinfectant when contaminated |
| Instruments and sterilization equipment | Practice staff only | No |
| General bloodborne pathogen training, at assignment and annually, records kept three years | No | Yes |
| Training on this office’s hazards and procedures | Provides it | Attends it |
| Hepatitis B vaccine offered within 10 working days of assignment | No | Yes |
| Post-exposure evaluation and follow-up | No | Yes |
| PPE for the work done on site | Yes | Uses it |
| Written cleaning schedule and methods | Approves it in the scope of work | Writes it and follows it |
What to ask a prospective contractor
Each of these comes with what a good answer sounds like and what should stop the conversation.
The disinfectant. Ask which product they’ll use in your office, its EPA registration number, and its contact time, and ask for the Safety Data Sheets for every chemical they’ll bring in.
Good answer: they name the product, hand you the EPA Reg. No. or the label itself, tell you the contact time, the number of minutes the surface has to stay visibly wet to do what the label claims, and explain how their staff keeps it wet that long. The Safety Data Sheets come with it, for the disinfectant and everything else on the cart, floor products and restroom cleaners included.
Red flag: “We use hospital-grade disinfectant,” with no product name, a spray-and-wipe routine that leaves the surface dry in seconds, or no Safety Data Sheets on hand.
The label is the controlling document, for the contact time, the method of application, and the pathogens it claims. If a contractor offers fogging or electrostatic spraying, ask to see the label directions for that method, because a product without them isn’t approved to go on that way, and fogging doesn’t replace cleaning the surface first. The Safety Data Sheets matter for your side too, your staff work in those same rooms the next morning, and OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard, 29 CFR 1910.1200(e)(2), expects an employer who brings hazardous chemicals onto a shared worksite to give the other employers there access to the sheets.
The exposure control plan. Ask to see it, and ask when it was last reviewed.
Good answer: they hand it over, it’s written for their own employees, and it was reviewed within the last year.
Red flag: they point you to your office’s plan, or tell you “we follow OSHA.”
Training records. Ask for the bloodborne pathogen training records of the staff who will clean your office.
Good answer: dated records showing training at assignment and within the past year, kept for three years.
Red flag: “Everyone gets trained when they’re hired.”
Hepatitis B vaccine. Ask how and when they offer it.
Good answer: within 10 working days of assignment, and they can show you how it’s tracked.
Red flag: they aren’t sure, or it’s left to the employee.
Exposures. Ask what happens if one of their cleaners is stuck by a needle in your office.
Good answer: they walk you through it, who the employee reports to, where they’re evaluated, how the follow-up is documented.
Red flag: “That’s never happened,” or that your office would handle it.
Scope of work. Ask for a written scope, what gets cleaned, how often, and what they won’t touch.
Good answer: zone by zone, waiting room, restrooms, break room, operatories limited to housekeeping surfaces, the sterilization area and instruments excluded, a frequency for each task.
Red flag: “We’ll clean everything.” A contractor who will clean everything hasn’t worked out what they shouldn’t be cleaning.
Schedule. Ask how they set the cleaning frequency.
Good answer: they asked about your patient volume and your hours before they set it, because a practice seeing patients five days a week needs a different schedule than one that adds evenings or Saturdays, and the frequency for each zone follows from that.
Red flag: a standard package, the same nights a week they’d quote any office of the same size.
Floors. Ask how they’ll maintain the floors you actually have.
Good answer: they ask what’s down before they answer, because dental offices often mix resilient flooring with a floor finish, ceramic tile and grout, and carpet in the waiting room or offices, and they name a method and a product for each.
Red flag: one cleaner for every floor in the building.
The wrong chemical can dull or strip a floor finish, and a product mixed too strong or left behind as residue can leave a floor slick, which turns a cleaning problem into a slip hazard for patients and staff.
Cross-contamination. Ask how they keep from carrying contamination from one room to the next.
Good answer: color-coded cloths and mops by area, restroom tools that never leave the restroom, working clean to dirty and top to bottom.
Red flag: one bucket and one set of cloths for the whole office.
Verification. Ask how they check their own work.
Good answer: scheduled supervisor inspections, written down, and a willingness to walk the office with you. Some use fluorescent marker checks, an invisible mark placed on a surface before cleaning and checked under an ultraviolet (UV) light after, the same method hospitals use to audit cleaning.
Red flag: “You’ll let us know if we miss anything.”
Insurance, license, and access. Ask for proof of general liability insurance and workers’ compensation coverage, their business license, and how they screen their staff and control keys and alarm codes.
Good answer: a certificate of insurance sent from their insurer, listing your practice as certificate holder, along with a copy of the endorsement naming your practice as an additional insured on their general liability policy, active workers’ compensation coverage for their employees, a current business license, background checks before anyone is assigned to your office, and keys and alarm codes issued to named people, logged, and changed when someone leaves.
Red flag: “We’re fully insured,” with nothing on paper, a certificate that says “additional insured” with no endorsement behind it, or a crew that changes from week to week and nobody who can tell you who has your keys.
The cleaning crew is in the building after hours with patient records, medications and equipment, and nobody from the practice there, so knowing who has access is part of hiring them, not an afterthought.
Credentials. Ask what the company holds, and what it took to get it. ISSA’s CIMS certifies a company’s management systems through a third-party on-site assessment, and it isn’t specific to healthcare. GBAC STAR Service Accreditation is the version built for cleaning contractors, focused on infection prevention, and it requires a share of frontline staff and supervisors to be trained. GBAC Fundamentals is a short course for individuals, a few hours, and it tells you a person took the training, not that the company runs a program.
Good answer: they name the credential and explain what it required of them.
Red flag: a logo they can’t explain, or a “certification” from a short online video course with no assessment behind it.
A credential is a good sign. It doesn’t replace any of the answers above.
Before the number
A contractor should walk the office before quoting it. A price built from square footage over the phone hasn’t seen the operatories, the sterilization area they need to stay out of, the restricted rooms, or the floors, so it’s a number for a scope nobody has looked at. The walkthrough is also the first chance to see how they think, whether they ask who cleans what between patients or just measure the rooms.
Be careful with the lowest bid. A price well under the others often comes from minimal training, no documented procedures and thin supervision, and the practice pays the difference later, in work that has to be redone, floors that have to be refinished, and gaps in infection prevention.
Where healthcare-grade actually lives
Every one of these answers is something a contractor can put in your hands, a product label, a reviewed plan, dated training records, a certificate of insurance, a scope that keeps them out of the sterilization area. A cleaner delivering healthcare-grade work has those documents ready, because they need them to run the work properly whether anyone asks or not. A generic janitorial service usually doesn’t, and no amount of “medical” on a website fills that gap.
The office carries part of this too. The line between your staff’s between-patient disinfection and the contractor’s housekeeping work only holds if it’s written into the contract, and the site-specific training and PPE are yours to provide. Hiring a contractor doesn’t hand off the practice’s responsibility for infection prevention, the CDC’s dental guidance (CDC, “Summary of Infection Prevention Practices in Dental Settings: Basic Expectations for Safe Care,” 2016, Administrative Measures) expects every practice to have its own program with someone assigned to coordinate it, and the contractor is one part of that program, not a replacement for it. Healthcare-grade cleaning isn’t something a cleaning company claims, it’s something both sides can show on paper before the first night of work.
About Healthy Cleaning Resources
Healthy Cleaning Resources provides educational information and practical guidance on healthcare-grade cleaning and infection prevention. The guidance draws on real environmental services leadership experience in healthcare settings, and it’s written to help the people hiring and managing cleaning work know what to look for and what to ask.
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