Introducing CHCA

The Cleaning and Hygiene Council of Australia (CHCA) is a newly formed not for profit association who’s aim is to establish an umbrella organisation to represent the cleaning and hygiene industry.

An emphasis on a national curriculum and certification of cleaning operators is one of the primary goals of CHCA who believe by bringing together all the present qualifications and training courses already established along with the creation of a standardised national best practice training curriculum; a code of best practice for cleaning operators that includes sustainable processes and national colour coding benchmarks will raise the level of professionalism of the cleaning industry.

Sub Committees

The CHCA recently formed a steering committee made up of representatives of all the interested bodies and associations within the Cleaning and Hygiene Industry.  CHCA has identified an initial list of Industry issues to be addressed and has formed sub committees to research the issues and report back with their findings and recommendations.

Training Recognition

The sub- committee responsible for training is looking at the industry models around the world to determine which skills are suited to cover every aspect of cleaning within the Industry. These will be reviewed and aligned within the current Australian Quality Training Framework to ensure that training still remains within the government funded training package guidelines.

It is anticipated that once the skills agenda has been formalised those who have already graduated from the various certificate courses around the country should meet the criteria, and will be invited to be members of the Australian Cleaning Institute which will register their qualifications and issue appropriate certificates and post nominal letter. These members would then have access to further develop their skills by enrolling in additional levels of training which would not have been covered in their basic training.

Industry Best Practice

The Property Council, Governments, Construction and Property Services Industry Skills Council (CPSISC),  Facility and Property Managers and RTO’S will be asked to join and support the training and assessment of the various skills which will help to ensure there is one curriculum recognised across the Australian cleaning industry. The standardisation of training and assessment processes and subsequent monitoring of these will mean that varied standards of training delivery and assessment of competence will no longer be acceptable and the benchmark will have been raised for the cleaning industry.

Involvement of all stakeholders will result in CHCA being able to lobby for changes and improvements to the Asset Maintenance training package and cleaning industry Best Practice as a cohesive and credible body.