The RACGP Cleaning Requirements Checklist for GP Practices

If your practice is accredited against the RACGP Standards for General Practices — or working toward it — cleaning is one of the areas where practices most often discover a gap only when the accreditation review is already booked. Not because the practice is dirty, but because the standard asks for something most cleaning arrangements were never set up to produce: evidence.

This guide lays out what the infection prevention and control requirements (Criterion GP4.1) mean for your cleaning in practical terms, as a checklist you can walk your practice against today. It reflects how accreditation surveyors commonly assess cleaning — but the RACGP Standards are the authoritative source, so always cross-check against the current edition.

What the standard actually asks of your cleaning

The RACGP Standards don't prescribe a brand of disinfectant or a mopping technique. What they require is that your practice can demonstrate a system: infection risks are identified, cleaning addresses them, appropriate products and processes are used, and there's a record trail proving it happens consistently. In practice, surveyors look at four things:

1. Zoning — is cleaning equipment separated so a mop used in a toilet never touches a treatment room?
2. Products — are TGA-listed disinfectants used in clinical areas, at the right concentration and contact time?
3. Schedule — is there a documented cleaning schedule matched to each room's risk level, and is it actually followed?
4. Records — can you produce evidence of all of the above, going back months, without scrambling?

The checklist

1. Colour-coded zones and equipment

• Every room in the practice is classified into a cleaning zone — bathrooms/toilets, clinical (consultation, treatment and procedure rooms), general/admin, and kitchen/food areas.
• Cleaning equipment (mops, buckets, cloths) is colour-coded per zone — conventionally red for bathrooms, yellow for clinical, green for general, blue for kitchens.
• Equipment from one zone is never used in another — and your cleaner can explain the system if a surveyor asks them directly.
• Zone classifications are written down somewhere a surveyor can see, not just "understood".

2. Products and processes

• Clinical areas are cleaned with TGA-listed hospital-grade disinfectants, used per label instructions (dilution and contact time matter — a disinfectant wiped dry immediately hasn't disinfected anything).
• Safety Data Sheets (SDS) for every cleaning chemical used on-site are available to staff.
• High-touch surfaces — door handles, reception counters, waiting room arms, light switches — are on the schedule explicitly, not assumed under "general cleaning".
• Blood and body-fluid spill procedures exist, staff know where the spill kit is, and the cleaning provider knows their role in it.

3. Schedule and frequency

• A written cleaning schedule exists covering every area of the practice, with frequencies matched to risk — clinical rooms and bathrooms more often than storerooms.
• The schedule states who does each task — practice staff handle between-patient wipe-downs; the cleaning provider handles environmental cleaning — so nothing falls in the gap between the two.
• Periodic deep-clean tasks (walls, vents, blinds, under fixed equipment) appear on the schedule with their own frequency, not just "as needed".

4. Documentation and evidence

• Every clean produces a completed checklist — dated, task-level, signed off by the cleaner.
• Records are retained and retrievable — if a surveyor asks for "your cleaning records for March", someone can produce them in minutes.
• Photo documentation exists for completed cleans (not required by the letter of the standard, but it's the strongest evidence you can hold, and it ends any dispute about what was done).
• Your agreement with the cleaning provider specifies the compliance standard being cleaned to — a generic commercial cleaning contract that never mentions infection control is itself a gap.

5. The people doing the cleaning

• Cleaners working in your practice have been trained in infection-control cleaning — zoning, products, contact times — not just general commercial cleaning.
• They've been inducted into your practice: which rooms are which zone, where the spill kit lives, what waste goes where.
• The same people clean your practice consistently — high turnover is where trained systems quietly fall apart.

The gaps we find most often

When we run compliance walkthroughs in Adelaide practices, the same findings come up again and again — almost never "the practice is unclean", almost always a system gap:

• No records at all. The practice is cleaned nightly and has nothing to show for it. To a surveyor, undocumented cleaning is indistinguishable from no cleaning.
• One mop for the whole practice. The most common physical finding — the same equipment moving between toilets and treatment rooms.
• Supermarket products in clinical rooms. General-purpose spray isn't a TGA-listed disinfectant, no matter how strong it smells.
• The staff/cleaner gap. The practice assumes the cleaner does the treatment-room surfaces; the cleaner assumes clinical staff do. Nobody does, and nobody notices until review time.

What to do with this checklist

Walk your practice against it — honestly — and write down what's missing. If everything checks out, keep the note as evidence of self-assessment; surveyors like seeing that too. If gaps show up, they're almost all fixable in weeks, not months: zoned equipment is cheap, schedules are paperwork, and documentation is a habit your cleaning provider should be handing you by default.

And if your current provider can't produce a dated, signed checklist for last Tuesday's clean — that's the conversation to have first. See how we handle GP practice cleaning or get a price estimate for your practice in under a minute.

This guide is general information, not accreditation advice. Refer to the current edition of the RACGP Standards for General Practices for the authoritative requirements applying to your practice.