AHE Certificates and Certifications

AHE Certifications

Certified Healthcare Environmental Services Technician

Through proper care and maintenance of the health care environment, health care environmental services technicians play an essential role in patients’ experience of care, as well as ensuring patient safety and satisfaction. Today’s health care environmental services teams strive to go beyond cleaning, disinfecting, and caring for the environment. They seek to create clean and quiet healing spaces that lead to improved clinical outcomes.

The CHEST training and certification program certifies knowledge in seven content domains: environmental sanitation, textiles, regulatory compliance, waste management, financial stewardship, administration, planning, design and construction. The program offers streamlined training through a train-the-trainer model intended to save organizations’ resources.

Visit ahe.org/chest for more information.

Certified Surgical Cleaning Technician

The CSCT certification program sets a standard for technicians responsible for cleaning and disinfecting operating rooms — an intense, fast-paced, high-stakes environment. The program is designed to set a level of expertise for preventing infections and practicing evidence-based cleaning and disinfection techniques specific to the operating room and other surgical areas and procedure rooms.

Training emphasizes the importance of on-the-job performance and deepened self-awareness of working in the complex surgical environment. It includes surgical suite infection prevention; cleaning and disinfecting; problem solving; communication; and the impacts on patient and financial outcomes.

Visit ahe.org/csct for more information.

Certified Healthcare Environmental Services Professional

CHESP status provides both internal and external rewards. CHESPs enjoy the pride of recognition of being among the elite in a critical field of healthcare.  And CHESP is a premier credential based on a sound assessment that provides distinction in an increasingly competitive marketplace. 

Visit ahe.org/chesp for more information.

AHE Certificates

Strategic Leadership Series: Value-based Product Evaluation and Implementation

AHE’s Strategic Leadership Series’ Value-based Product Evaluation and Implementation is a certificate of mastery program that sets a new standard of excellence with respect to procurement and change management. This two-day course pinpoints and highlights ways leaders can transform from a more tactical approach to purchasing and product/process/technology implementation to a highly-focused strategic one. After completing this program, leaders are better equipped to deliver value to their organizations by impacting clinical and financial outcomes.

Visit ahe.org/vpei for more information.

Certificate of Mastery in Infection Prevention

CMIP is a robust 30-hour certificate program that provides environmental services leaders and other professionals with the requisite knowledge to meet the CMS requirements for a “trained” professional in infection prevention and control specific to the clinical environment of care. This program delves deeply into the most important topics in infection prevention:

  •          Microbiology and epidemiology
  •          Patient and health care worker safety
  •          Surveillance, risk assessment, outbreaks
  •          Antimicrobial stewardship
  •          Evidence-based cleaning practices and environmental monitoring
  •          Preventing infection during construction and mass casualty events.

The Certificate of Mastery in Infection Prevention (CMIP) requires online pre-work and an in-person training session, along with a post-session capstone project/assessment.

Visit ahe.org/cmip for more information.

Addtional Information

Why Certification?
Through proper care and maintenance of the healthcare environment, healthcare environmental services technicians play an essential role in patients’ experience of care, as well as, ensuring patient safety and satisfaction. Today’s healthcare environmental services teams strive to go beyond cleaning, disinfecting, and caring for the environment. They seek to create clean and quiet healing atmospheres that lead to improved outcomes. But in order to achieve these quality outcomes, healthcare environmental services technicians must be well-trained and demonstrate competence in a number of key areas.
The Healthcare Environmental Services Team
Healthcare environmental services technicians are a vital part of the healthcare team, and their work impacts many components of the daily operations of a facility including infection prevention, patient satisfaction, improved outcomes, and reimbursement. With so much at stake for healthcare facilities, training and certifying environmental services technicians in critical areas of competency must become an essential aspect of the facility’s training program.
A Certified Healthcare Environmental Services Certification Program would raise the national standard and level of practice with respect to how healthcare environmental services technicians are trained, and elevate their critical role in infection prevention and environmental hygiene.

BENEFITS OF CERTIFICATION

Healthcare Environmental Services Technician

  • Respect
  • Earned credential recognized by the American Hospital Association
  • Ability to perform and compete at the highest level for environmental services jobs

Employees

  • Increased patient safety, efficiency, and professionalism
  • Engaged environmental services staff
  • Improved patient satisfaction

Patients

  • Greater satisfaction
  • Better experience of care
  • Improved outcomes

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