Infection Control Procedure template
An infection control procedure is the written set of precautions your organisation uses to stop infection spreading at work — hand hygiene, cleaning and decontamination, personal protective equipment, safe handling of body fluid spillages and waste, and clear rules on when unwell staff stay away.
One case of norovirus can close a kitchen, empty a rota, or sweep through a care setting in days. The precautions that prevent that are cheap and simple, but only if they are written down, trained, and applied on every shift — not remembered mid-outbreak.
This template gives you the standard precautions in usable form: hand hygiene rules, PPE, cleaning disciplines, a spillage response, exclusion rules for unwell staff, and the training and records that keep it live.
Full text, ready to adapt.
Highlighted fields are placeholders — replace them with your organisation's specifics. A starting point, not legal advice.
Infection Control Procedure
SOP · Health & Safety
1. Purpose and scope
This procedure sets out how {{org.name}} prevents and controls the spread of infection at [site(s)/locations]. It applies to all staff, including temporary and agency workers, and to the protection of customers, visitors and anyone else our work affects.
It sits alongside [any sector-specific requirements: our food safety and hygiene procedure / national IPC guidance for our care services] — where those set a higher standard, the higher standard applies.
2. Roles and responsibilities
- Infection control lead ([name/role]): owns this procedure, keeps PPE and spill kit stocks at [location], arranges training, and decides on outbreak measures.
- Managers and supervisors: enforce the fitness-to-work rules, make sure materials are available on every shift, and escalate suspected outbreaks the same day.
- All staff: follow the precautions below, report symptoms before starting work, and report low stocks of soap, sanitiser, PPE or spill kit contents.
3. Hand hygiene
Hand hygiene is the single cheapest control in this procedure and the one most often skipped under pressure. The rules are below; the table at the end of this section lists the specific moments and the method each one calls for — print it and put a copy at every basin and sanitiser point, because a moment nobody can name is a moment nobody performs.
- 1Wash hands with soap and warm water, covering all surfaces of both hands, for [duration — the NHS says around 20 seconds, the time it takes to sing "Happy Birthday" twice], and dry thoroughly.
- 2Wash on arrival, before eating or handling food, after using the toilet, after coughing, sneezing or blowing your nose, after cleaning or handling waste, after removing gloves, and [before and after any personal care task].
- 3Use alcohol-based hand sanitiser (meeting current guidance) where a basin isn't immediately available — but not as a substitute when hands are visibly dirty.
- 4Cover cuts and abrasions with a waterproof dressing before starting work.
- 5Keep nails short; [remove/limit jewellery per your setting's rules].
| Moment or trigger | Method (soap and water or sanitiser) | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Arriving on shift, and entering or leaving a care or food area | Soap and water | Sets the baseline for the shift and stops whatever came in on your hands from the bus, the car park or the last room going any further. |
| Before touching a person you care for | Sanitiser — soap and water if hands are visibly dirty | Protects them from organisms you are carrying on your hands from the last task or the last person. |
| Before a clean or aseptic task — [dressing, injection, medication, catheter care] | Sanitiser — soap and water if hands are visibly dirty | The moment closest to the point of entry: anything on your hands here goes straight into a wound or a line. |
| After any body fluid exposure risk — [blood, vomit, urine, faeces, wound care] | Soap and water | The highest-risk moment in the list. Wash even if gloves were worn, and wash even if you saw nothing on your skin. |
| After touching a person you care for | Sanitiser | Stops what you picked up from them travelling to the next person, the door handle or your phone. |
| After touching their immediate surroundings — [bed rails, chair, table, call bell] | Sanitiser | Surfaces around a person carry the same organisms they do; guidance treats touching them as a hand hygiene moment in its own right. |
| Caring for anyone with vomiting or diarrhoea, or suspected norovirus or C. difficile | Soap and water only | National IPC guidance directs soap and water in these cases — alcohol sanitiser is not relied on against these organisms. |
| Before eating, and before handling or serving food | Soap and water | One of the NHS's everyday moments, and the one that turns a single unwell food handler into an outbreak. FSA guidance is explicit that anti-bacterial hand gels must not be used to replace handwashing in a food business — they can only follow it. |
| Before and after handling raw meat, fish or unwashed vegetables | Soap and water | Cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat food is the classic route; sanitiser on greasy hands does nothing. |
| After using the toilet, or after helping someone else with toileting | Soap and water | Faecal-oral spread is the main route for the infections that close kitchens and empty rotas. |
| After coughing, sneezing or blowing your nose | Soap and water | Respiratory viruses travel on hands as readily as through the air; the tissue is only half the control. |
| Before and after dressing a cut or wound — your own or someone else's | Soap and water | Named by the NHS as an everyday washing moment. Broken skin is an entry point in both directions. |
| After removing gloves, an apron or any other PPE | Sanitiser — soap and water if hands are visibly dirty | Hands are routinely contaminated during removal. Gloves are never a substitute for this step. |
| After cleaning, handling waste, or handling soiled linen or workwear | Soap and water | These tasks put hands in contact with exactly the material the rest of this procedure exists to contain. |
4. Personal protective equipment
- Wear single-use gloves and apron for any contact with blood or body fluids, [personal care tasks], and cleaning with hazardous chemicals.
- Single-use PPE is never reused; change it between tasks and [between individuals in care settings].
- Remove PPE in the trained order, dispose of it as contaminated waste, and wash hands immediately after removal.
- PPE stock is kept at [location] and replenished by [role] — report low stock, never ration.
- PPE is in addition to hand hygiene and cleaning, never instead of them.
5. Cleaning and decontamination
Routine cleaning follows the schedule at [location], which lists each area, frequency, method, product and owner. Cleaning frequency increases during any period of increased infection risk, on the instruction of the infection control lead.
- High-touch surfaces — [door handles, light switches, tills, phones, keypads, handrails] — are cleaned at least [frequency].
- Use the colour-coded cloths and equipment scheme: [describe your scheme].
- Use disinfectants at the manufacturer's stated dilution and contact time.
- Clean visibly dirty surfaces with detergent first — disinfectant over dirt doesn't work.
6. Blood and body fluid spillages
- 1Keep people away from the spillage area.
- 2Collect the spill kit from [location] and put on gloves and apron.
- 3Cover and absorb the spillage with [paper towels/absorbent granules per your kit].
- 4Clean the area with detergent, then disinfect with [product] at the stated dilution and contact time.
- 5Dispose of all materials and PPE into [waste stream/bag type], seal, and place in [disposal point].
- 6Wash hands thoroughly, restock the kit, and report the spillage to [role] for recording.
7. Staff illness and exclusion
Report symptoms of infectious illness — vomiting, diarrhoea, fever, [others relevant to your setting] — to your manager before starting work. Anyone with vomiting or diarrhoea stays away from work until symptom-free for [period — check current UK guidance; 48 hours is the widely used standard]; [food handlers and staff providing personal care follow the stricter rules for their role].
Nobody is pressured to work while infectious. Cover is arranged via [describe your cover arrangement], and exclusion under this procedure is treated as sickness absence, not a conduct issue.
8. Waste and laundry
- Separate general waste from contaminated waste ([used PPE, spillage materials, hygiene waste]) using [bag/bin types].
- Contaminated waste is disposed of via [route — clinical waste contractor where applicable]; bags are sealed before moving and never decanted.
- Handle soiled linen and workwear with gloves, bag it at the point of use, and wash it [per the temperature and method in current guidance].
- Sharps, if present, go directly into a sharps container at the point of use — never into bags or bins. [Delete if not applicable.]
9. Training, records and review
Every staff member is trained on this procedure at induction, before their first unsupervised shift, with refreshers at [frequency]. Training records, cleaning sign-offs, spillage reports and any outbreak logs are kept in [system/location].
This procedure is reviewed [frequency, e.g. annually], after any outbreak or spillage incident that surfaced a gap, and whenever national guidance changes. Owner: [name/role]. Next review due: [date].
How to adapt this template.
Scale it to your setting first: a care service keeps everything and adds national IPC guidance; an office can cut personal care and sharps content down to hand hygiene, cleaning and exclusion rules.
Buy and place the physical kit before publishing — spill kits, PPE stock, colour-coded cloths — and write their real locations into the text.
Set your exclusion rule from current guidance and make sure rota cover exists, or staff will come in ill regardless of what the page says.
Fill in the cleaning schedule with your actual high-touch surfaces — walk the site and list what hands really touch.
Train it practically: have staff do a mock spillage clean-up once, not just read about it.
Name the infection control lead and a deputy, and diarise the review.
Turn this template into trained, proven behaviour
A policy in a drawer proves nothing. In TrainedTeam this template becomes assigned training with a knowledge check, version history, and an audit-ready record of who completed what, when.
Infection Control Procedure template FAQs
Is an infection control procedure a legal requirement in the UK?
Not as a named document for every business. The general duties of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 require you to manage infection risks your work creates, and the COSHH Regulations 2002 apply where staff are exposed to biological agents such as body fluids. CQC-registered care providers are directly assessed on infection prevention and control, so in those settings a written procedure is effectively unavoidable.
What's the difference between cleaning and disinfection?
Cleaning uses detergent and water to remove dirt and most germs from a surface; disinfection uses a chemical at the right dilution and contact time to reduce remaining germs to a safe level. Order matters: disinfectant applied over visible dirt is largely wasted, so clean first, then disinfect.
Do office-based businesses need an infection control procedure?
A lighter version pays for itself: hand hygiene, regular cleaning of high-touch surfaces, and a clear stay-home rule for staff with sickness or diarrhoea. Those three things reduce the absence a single infectious colleague can cause, and they cost almost nothing to run.
How long should staff with vomiting or diarrhoea stay off work?
Check current UK guidance — the widely used standard is to stay away until 48 hours after symptoms stop, and food businesses in particular apply it strictly. Set the rule in your procedure, tell staff at induction, and apply it consistently: an exclusion rule that flexes under rota pressure is not a rule.
What should be in a body fluid spill kit?
At minimum: single-use gloves and apron, absorbent material (paper towels or granules), a suitable disinfectant, waste bags, and a copy of the clean-up steps. Keep it where staff can reach it fast, check it after every use, and audit the stock at a set frequency.
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