Use of a fluorescent marker for assessing hospital bathroom cleanliness

Highlights • Contamination of hospital surfaces plays a role in the spread of healthcare-associated infections. Today there is no agreement on how environmental surfaces should be cleaned and also on the correct procedure to assess cleanliness. There are different methods for the evaluation of hospital cleaning practices: among these, UV marker seems to be an effective, inexpensive and practical method. Using a fluorescent marker to assess the efficacy of daily cleaning of different surfaces in hospital bathrooms, we wanted to: • suggest how different methods to assess environmental cleanliness can be used in a complementary manner. • identifying potential correlations between results obtained by UV marker and microbial contamination.