Two jobs that look like one
Cleaning a practice and disinfecting clinical surfaces are separate responsibilities with separate training behind them, and they happen in the same room an hour apart. Confusing them is how a practice ends up with either a compliance problem or a cleaning crew that will not go near anything.
The workable division is simple to state: your clinical team handles anything that touches a patient. The cleaning crew handles the room around it.
What that means in an operatory
Cleaners: floors, cabinet exteriors, sinks, walls, doors, light switches, waste removal to the point your protocol allows.
Clinical staff: the chair, the delivery unit, the light handles, instruments, trays, anything in a pouch, anything in the sterilisation cycle.
The sterilisation room is the case that catches people out. The floor and the surrounding surfaces are cleaning work. The autoclave, the ultrasonic and everything staged for processing are not, and no cleaning contract should imply otherwise.
Why it has to be in the scope document
Not because anyone expects a dispute, but because crews change. The person who understood the boundary perfectly leaves, and their replacement is handed a building and a checklist. If the boundary lives in that checklist it survives; if it lives in a conversation from eighteen months ago it does not.
It also protects the cleaning company, which is the other half of why it works. A crew that knows exactly where to stop cleans confidently up to that line instead of hovering.
Timing is not negotiable in the way it is elsewhere
Most commercial cleaning can flex to a mid-day slot if the schedule demands it. Clinical cleaning generally cannot. Work happens after the last patient or before the first, and a vacuum running in the corridor during a procedure is not a scheduling inconvenience, it is a failure.
In practice this means medical and dental work concentrates into a narrow window that everybody wants, which is worth knowing when you are asking how quickly someone can start.
Products, and the paperwork behind them
Ask for the product list and the safety data sheets, and keep them where an inspector can be handed them. EPA registration numbers and contact times are the two things that get checked, and "hospital-grade" on a label is a marketing phrase rather than an answer.
Contact time is the one most often got wrong in the field. A disinfectant that needs to stay wet for four minutes and is wiped dry in thirty seconds has not disinfected anything, and it is an easy thing to get wrong in a hurry.