Many schools, care homes and hospitals have made significant improvements to their housekeeping and catering services through our HOTSAP scheme.

HOTSAP – the Hotel Services Assessment Programme – is used by clients to financially and qualitatively assess their catering and housekeeping operations.

Crucially HOTSAP is not public facing and allows facilities to perfect their housekeeping and catering services before going for a high profile CAP Award, with all the reputational and marketing benefits it brings.

HOTSAP is based on regulatory, best practice and industry standards of performance and is often used as a ‘test’ for the CAP Award, a bit like a mock exam.

The structure of an assessment visit is much more fluid against a site needs and our inspectors can spend time focusing in on a particular area which you feel requires guidance – food quality, cleaning standards, financial tools, etc.

The assessment highlights short-comings and strengths and allows corrective actions to be taken.

For example on the housekeeping side, we look at the risk of cross-contamination within the COSHH cupboards due to colour coded light equipment not being segregated i.e. mop handles, brushes, dust pans, etc. To remedy this a couple of wall grips could be installed to segregate the equipment and reduce the risk of contamination.

On the catering front we can carry out benchmarking exercises to show the actual food spend – often higher than expected. A series of ‘tools of the trade’ provided by HOTSAP will always identify the cause.

These desired upgrades then become part of the appraisal process for the department with a percentage improvement figure being set as the target.

Our clients find that HOTSAP is a useful group analysis tool across a number of sites for catering and housekeeping service delivery. Actions required by the Group Head Office can then be drawn from the analysis and applied across all sites to deliver continuity of best practice.

If you think that HOTSAP could help you perfect your catering or housekeeping function then do get in touch – there’s always a smarter way to work.