The responsibility for preventing nosocomial infections does not rest solely on the feet of nurses. This effort must be a team effort that includes all staff within a facility. During clinical rotations at Bartow Regional Hospital, Galen's students noticed several times during their rotation in the emergency department that the rooms were not cleaned by environmental services, but by nurses. and/or technicians who work in emergency rooms. Staff wiped beds and changed sheets so the rooms were ready for the next round of patients who would cycle through. Some Galen nursing students noted that when cleaning staff cleaned the isolation rooms after the patient was discharged, they simply wore gloves to clean the room, without gowns or other personal protective equipment. Students also observed that staff took medical equipment into isolation rooms to take vital signs or blood sugar readings and that the equipment was not cleaned before being taken to the next patient's room. The focus is often on blood-borne pathogens by hospital and employee training staff, but perhaps more should be said about contamination of surfaces and equipment, cross-contamination and how to effectively remove contaminants from the hospital environment. Some of the most common pathogens found on hospital surfaces, such as MRSA, VRE, norovirus, and C. diff, have certain properties that allow them to contaminate hospital surfaces and equipment. These include the ability to survive on a surface for long periods of time, the ability to be transmitted by colonized hands, a low inoculated dose of the pathogen, and resistance to certain disinfectants......middle of the paper.....It is the role of all staff in a facility to keep it clean, disinfect it and reduce the number of pathogens that could potentially come into contact with a patient and cause infection nosocomial. To achieve this effectively and consistently, all staff must be trained in disinfection guidelines, hospital policy, pathogens and product information. A system to monitor the effectiveness of these interventions should also be put in place. The Centers for Disease Control has created an environmental checklist to help facilities monitor and evaluate the cleaning of rooms and surfaces within the facility (CDC, 2010). A checklist such as that from the CDC used in conjunction with the Bartow Regional Hospitals Cleaning Products and Information List should be used by environmental services and healthcare personnel to serve as a guide to facilitate effective decontamination of surfaces..