Expanding care beyond hospital walls
Expanding care beyond hospital walls
By sydney | Published: 2025-09-23 15:10:00 | Source: Crothall Healthcare
Fighting cancer is hard enough. Everyone deserves to heal in a clean and peaceful place.
how A Crothall team provides comfort and control to patients during treatment
When you’re in the middle of treatment for reproductive system cancer, even simple things like cleaning your house or apartment may seem impossible.
“Because I was mentally disoriented from the chemotherapy, I didn’t have the strength.” Diane, one of the first patients in the program, explained. “Their care and respect made me feel less stressed.”
This is where the woman-to-woman cleaning program comes into play.
The program began when Woman to Woman, a national nonprofit organization that supports patients with gynecologic cancers, received a grant to fund supportive services for women undergoing treatment. House cleaning was one of the most pressing needs identified. Mount Sinai Hospital’s EVS team, staffed and supported by Crothall Healthcare, responded by providing trusted, hospital-trained cleaning professionals who can extend their care into the home.
Team members like EVS Director Benjamin Colon and Assistant Director Idulka Cepeda were among the first to step forward, bringing the same care and attention they provide every day inside the hospital to the homes of patients receiving treatment. They were soon joined by housekeepers Katie Lantigua and Cindy Diaz, and more team members passionate about making a difference.
“We didn’t hesitate,” says Idolca, “We were all eager to start helping as soon as we heard about the program.”
Support consists of comfort and choice
Every part of the cleaning program is designed to support patients on their terms. Each patient reviews a range of profiles and selects the housekeeper and supervisor who best suits their needs. This choice is important. It provides something that is often lost during cancer treatment: control.
For Diane, respect and care for the team was most important.
Our team provides each home with the same level of detail and care they would within a hospital. They follow the standards of our Positive Impressions Program, which focuses not only on how to clean/sterilize, but also on how to engage patients and their families. From high-touch disinfecting to high-level cleaning techniques, our staff knows how to create a space that feels safe and cared for, because they do it in clinical settings every day.
Living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms are treated with the same attention as we give intensive care rooms and surgical suites. As in a hospital, the goal is not just cleanliness: comfort, familiarity and a sense of calm.
A calming effect with lasting meaning
Diane, one of the first patients to participate, was undergoing treatment Stage IV ovarian cancer. She shared how much service means to her.
“When they told me they were coming out to clean my house, it was like I got a million dollars. It made a world of difference.”
Because this work takes place inside patients’ homes, the team handles each visit with care and caution. There are no before and after photos, just deeply personal moments of relief and gratitude, as patients welcome us into their private spaces during critical times, and we do not take that trust lightly.
It’s not just about keeping things clean. It’s about lifting the burden so patients can focus on rest, recovery and the moments that matter most.
We look forward with heart
Today, the Woman to Woman Cleaning Program serves patients throughout New York City and surrounding communities. It is a local program grounded in a national mission that can be scaled as more hospitals recognize the power of nonclinical support.
As more referrals come in, the team is ready. They don’t just bring mops and vacuum cleaners. They bring consistency, dignity, and a reminder that no one should go through this alone.
Ben is excited about the potential impact, “We will continue to grow the program one home at a time. Because a clean space won’t change the diagnosis, but it can help a person gain the strength to keep going.”
For Diane, that strength meant more than just recovery. It meant the chance to settle into her new home.
“Once we got home, the boxes were in the dining room, and I told myself I would unpack when I felt like it. The team made it possible.
To learn more or refer a patient, contact the Woman to Woman program coordinators at Mount Sinai.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
