First Impressions
Two days ago I wrote about three ways to check if a room is clean: visual inspection, fluorescent marker, and ATP testing. All three exist because none of them fully agree with each other, and none of them is the one your patient is actually using.
A patient forms an opinion about your hospital before anyone tells them the room passed any of those three tests. They form it by looking around: no dust on the windowsill, no wrapper in the trash, how the floor looks, a bed made square. That opinion becomes data. It shows up on a federal survey, and that is how the next patient hears about your hospital before they walk through the door.
