Write it down, keep it short, and make it match what actually happens in your building. A workable plan for a small dog premises is one or two pages: who cleans what, how often, with which product, what happens when a member of staff goes off sick, and who covers their work. If it cannot be read aloud in five minutes at the start of a shift, it will not be followed.
Start with the plan, not the paperwork
Most owners of small kennels, training halls and day-care rooms already do the right things. The gap is that nothing is written down, so a new member of staff learns by watching, and an outbreak or a complaint leaves you with no record of what was done.
A plan for premises of this size needs six things on it.
- The person responsible. One named person per shift, not “all staff”.
- The areas and their frequency. Reception and door handles, exercise yards, kennel blocks, grooming tables, training hall floors, shared water bowls, leads and slip leads, crates, vehicles.
- The products. The name of the disinfectant, its dilution, its contact time, and where the safety data sheet is kept. Contact time is the part people skip; a product sprayed and wiped immediately has done very little.
- Cleaning order. Clean areas first, dirty areas last, and never the same cloth from a kennel block back to the kitchen or the office.
- Waste and laundry. Where soiled bedding goes, how it is transported, at what temperature it is washed, and how it is dried.
- Records. A simple sheet: date, area, product, initials. One line per task.
If you want a worked example of how small premises put this kind of document together, including the customer-facing side of it, an independent magazine covering infection prevention in shops and workplaces sets out a small business infection control plan in plain terms, and it is written for owners rather than for inspectors.
Two details matter more in dog premises than in most small businesses. First, the animal side and the human side are not the same plan. Kennel cough, parvovirus and ringworm are managed with your veterinary surgeon, and vaccination and isolation rules belong in that conversation. The human plan covers hands, surfaces, laundry and air. Keep them in one folder but do not blur them.
Second, hand hygiene is the whole plan in miniature. A wash basin with hot water, soap and paper towels at the point where staff move between dogs does more than any fogging machine. If the only sink is at the far end of the building, staff will use hand gel on dirty hands, which is close to useless.
What rules should I put on a customer notice?
A customer notice should carry the rules a visitor can actually follow, in the order they meet them. Anything longer than a dozen lines will not be read at the door.
Put these on it:
- One household at a time in the reception area, or a stated limit on how many people wait inside.
- Do not enter the kennel or exercise areas unless a member of staff takes you through.
- Hands: gel at the entrance, and a request to wash hands after handling any dog, including your own.
- Dogs with a cough, sickness or diarrhoea stay at home. Give a phone number to call instead, and say clearly that this is not a cancellation charge.
- Vaccination and kennel cough status required before the first visit, and what you accept as proof.
- Lead and collar policy in shared spaces, and whether toys and bowls come from home.
- What you will do if a dog becomes unwell on site: who is called, which veterinary practice, and how the owner is told.
The tone matters as much as the content. A notice that reads like a warning puts people off; a notice that explains why, in one clause, gets followed. “Please keep your dog at home if he has been coughing in the last seven days, because it spreads quickly between dogs here” works better than a list of prohibitions.
Print it at a size that can be read standing up, put a date on it, and review it once a year. If you change a rule, change the notice the same week.
What is a fair staff sickness and return to work policy?
Fair means three things at once: it protects the dogs and the other staff, it does not push people to work while ill, and it does not leave the owner guessing about pay.
Set out the following in writing.
When to stay away. Vomiting, diarrhoea, a fever, or a cough that is not explained by a known long-term condition. For vomiting and diarrhoea, the usual public health advice for food and care settings is to stay away until 48 hours after symptoms have stopped. That figure is a reasonable one to borrow here, because staff handle animals, bedding, bowls and shared surfaces.
Who to tell and when. A phone call before the shift starts, to a named person, not a message left on a group chat.
Pay. Say plainly what is paid and what is not. Statutory sick pay rules apply, and a small business that states its position in advance avoids most disputes.
Return to work. A short conversation before the first shift back: are symptoms gone, is any medication relevant, does the person need lighter duties for a day or two. Record the date of return.
Cover. Who takes the kennel round, who covers the training class, and at what point a class is cancelled rather than run short-staffed. Decide this before you need it.
Dogs and illness. A member of staff with a skin infection, an open wound on the hand, or a suspected ringworm infection should not be handling dogs until their GP or the practice has advised. This is a two-way risk and it belongs in the same policy, not in a separate conversation.
One more point that owners often miss: the policy has to survive a busy week. If the only person who can run the morning round is the person who is ill, the plan is not a plan. Cross-train at least one other person on every task in the cleaning schedule.
Air, laundry and the things that are easy to forget
Ventilation is the cheapest control you have and the one most often ignored. In a training hall or an indoor day-care room, opening opposing doors or windows for ten minutes between groups changes the air. If the building has mechanical ventilation, clean the filters on a schedule and write the date on them.
Laundry: bedding, towels and grooming coats should be washed at the highest temperature the fabric allows, dried fully, and stored clean away from soiled items. A single dirty bin next to a clean shelf undoes the work.
Shared equipment: leads, muzzles, crates, agility contacts and water bowls. Decide what is per-dog and what is shared, and how shared items are cleaned between users.
Vehicles: the boot of a car carrying dogs to and from a site is part of your premises in practice. A wipe-down and a fresh liner between groups is a two-minute job.
Records: keep them for at least a year. If a customer or an environmental health officer asks what you did in a given week, a one-line entry answers the question.
Where to look for the underlying guidance
The technical content of a plan should come from named sources, not from a forum. In the UK, the Health and Safety Executive and the UK Health Security Agency publish the general principles; your own veterinary surgeon advises on the animal-specific diseases; and the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control publish the wider material on hand hygiene and ventilation that the general sections of your plan rest on. Write those sources on the plan itself, with the date you last checked them.
None of this requires a consultant or a certificate. It requires two pages, a named person, a signed sheet, and a review date. The premises that cope best with a bad week are the ones that wrote it down in a quiet one.