Hand Hygiene Compliance Improvement in Healthcare Settings

Introduction

In the hospital setting, there are many issues nurses face that they have no control over. Issues including a shortage of supplies, workload, and demand created by the patients. One of the few problems the patients’ face that nurses can prevent is the transmission of infection. Hand hygiene is a habit that most hospital personnel do not abide by and many do not even think about the consequences of not washing their hands. The use of proper hand hygiene can eliminate up to 70% of infections that would have been transferred from patient to patient; however, there are many issues that hospitals face regarding compliance to hand hygiene protocols.

Implementing Hand Hygiene Audits

Accountability is an issue that hospitals face regarding hand hygiene. Implementing hand hygiene audits is a solution that gives constructive feedback and holds the person accountable for their actions. The use of individualized target feedback will allow the hospital to reprimand officials for lack of patient safety and establish an opportunity to educate them on proper hand hygiene (Smiddy, Murphy, Savage, & Browne, 2019). The goal of the audit is to reinforce the importance of washing your hands and when personnel should be washing their hands. Sometimes someone was not taught how to properly wash their hands or they were in a rush to assist another patient with self-care. This audit is beneficial to help eliminate the barrier to education and introduce a system that can remind personnel to take time to protect their patients and themselves. Being able to hold a person accountable for negligence will help break poor hand hygiene habits.

Breaking habits is the most difficult aspect of fixing the hand hygiene dilemma. My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene movement is a movement to break the habit of just washing your hands when you enter and leave a patient’s room. The five times you should perform hand hygiene is before touching a patient, before an aseptic procedure, after exposure to bodily fluids, after touching a patient, and after touching a patient’s surroundings (Bock, 2019). This solves the issue of personnel only washing their hands before and after entering a patient’s room. With that philosophy, we would have been transferring bacteria after cleaning a patient, after touching a patients’ tray, and many other instances. After education was received by hospital staff and interventions were initiated hand hygiene compliance increased to 46% from 18% (Bock, 2019). By using My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene, we can better protect our patients and ourselves from any bacteria we come into contact with while optimizing the best care we can give. Once you start breaking the habits, you can progress to enforcing compliance in your hospital.

Importance of Hygiene Compliance

Compliance is an issue that most hospitals cannot find a solution for. By adding a wireless sensor to the entrance of the patient’s room, it can initiate a verbal reminder to wash your hands upon entry and exit (Hou, Rosenberg, Steer, Cricco, & Campos, 2019). Without the sensor and reminder, it was found that 6% of hospital staff performed hand hygiene before entry and after exiting the room (Hou, Rosenberg, Steer, Cricco, & Campos, 2019). Once the sensor was implemented, the hospital staff’s participation in hand hygiene increased to 38% (Hou, Rosenberg, Steer, Cricco, & Campos, 2019). The solution is not a cost-efficient one; however, the percentage increase after implementation is incredible. Without the device, less than 10% of the hospital staff were properly protecting their patients from the transmission of infection. One out of ten hospital personnel actively washed their hands without needing the reminder. This statistic proves that compliance with handwashing is a detrimental issue to patient safety.

Conclusion

Hand hygiene is the simplest and most cost-efficient intervention for promoting infection control. Methods to improve the commitment to adequate hand hygiene include auditing personnel to hold accountability, breaking poor hand hygiene habits, and enforcing compliance with all personnel. Maybe the fact that it is such an easy and time-consuming task is the reason that hospital staff has such a hard time complying with the protocols. Sometimes the easiest tasks are the hardest ones to complete. As the late Steve Jobs once said “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains” (Jobs, 2004).

References

1. Bock, R. (2019). Hand Hygiene Compliance and Glove Use. Retrieved October 26, 2019, from https://sigma.nursingrepository.org/bitstream/ha2ndle/10755/16934/Bock_95611_PST253.pdf?sequence=1.
2. Hou, C. M., Rosenberg, M. C., Steer, R. A., Cricco, C., & Campos, K. (2019, May, 27). A
3. Motion-Detection Electronic Hand Hygiene Verbal Reminder Increases Adherence in a Standard Precaution Room. Retrieved October 26, 2019, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0196655319302937
4. Jobs, S. (2004, January 11). Steve Jobs Quotes. Retrieved from https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/steve_jobs_416929.
5. Smiddy, M. P., Murphy, O. M., Savage, E., & Browne, J. P. (2019, January 31). The influence of observational hand hygiene auditing on consultant doctors' hand hygiene behaviors: A qualitative study. Retrieved October 26, 2019, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0196655318312069.