Across Swansea Bay and South West Wales, a large share of care homes belong to groups rather than being single independent sites — operators with three, four, sometimes a dozen homes spread between the city, the valleys and Carmarthenshire. If you run one of those groups, the extract cleaning problem is rarely technical. It's administrative.
How schedules drift
Homes rarely join a group at the same time, and they rarely get cleaned at the same time. One site gets done in March because a manager chased it, another in September because an inspection prompted it, a third gets missed entirely for eighteen months because the manager who used to book it has left. Within two years you have ten different renewal dates, several different contractors and no single view of which kitchens are actually in date.
That's the state most groups are in when an inspector or an insurer asks the question — and it's the state that turns a simple compliance item into a scramble.
What a group schedule looks like
The fix is straightforward: quote every kitchen at once, survey each one properly, then set intervals per site based on what that kitchen actually cooks, with all the paperwork landing in one place. Sites don't need identical intervals — a 90-bed nursing home with heavy production shouldn't be on the same cycle as a 26-bed residential home doing light cooking. What matters is that the whole estate is visible on one sheet.
Practical advantages
- One point of contact rather than each home manager sourcing their own contractor.
- Consistent documentation — the same certificate format, the same readings, the same photographic standard across every site.
- Better pricing. Several kitchens booked together in one area is more efficient to deliver, and that shows up in the quote.
- Nothing gets missed. The commonest failure isn't a bad clean, it's a home that quietly falls off the list.
Homes in different counties
Groups in this region often straddle boundaries — a home in Swansea, one in Neath Port Talbot, one in Carmarthenshire. That makes no difference to the standard or the paperwork, and the whole area is comfortably coverable in a single planning round.
Getting the estate surveyed
The starting point is simply a list: each home, bed numbers, roughly what the kitchen cooks, and the date of the last clean if it's known. From that we can arrange quotes for the group and flag which kitchens look overdue. Where a home turns out to have domestic-style extraction rather than a commercial canopy, we'll say so rather than quoting for work it doesn't need.
More on the sector on our care home kitchen cleaning page, and on nursing homes specifically.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do all our homes need the same cleaning interval?
No, and they usually shouldn't. Interval should follow what each kitchen actually cooks — a large nursing-home production kitchen may need quarterly cleaning while a small residential home is fine at six or twelve months. The value of a group schedule is visibility, not uniformity.
Is it cheaper to book several homes together?
Generally yes. Several kitchens in one region planned into a single round is more efficient than ten separate call-outs, and that efficiency is reflected in the quote.
Can we get one report covering the whole group?
You'll get a certificate and photographic pack per kitchen, because that's what each home needs for its own CIW file — plus an overview of the estate showing every site's clean date and next-service date in one place.