Category Archives: Hand Hygiene
Hand Hygiene Compliance Rates Aren’t as Important as You Think
Want to decrease HAIs in your hospital or healthcare facility? Stop focusing on hand hygiene compliance rates. Yes, poor hand hygiene is strongly associated with healthcare-associated infections. That much has been known since the mid-1800s when Dr. ...
Monitoring the 5 Moments of Hand Hygiene May Not Be Necessary
The World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the “5 moments of hand hygiene” in 2009 to highlight the importance of hand hygiene in preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). WHO recommends that healthcare workers clean their hands at ...
Glove Use Requires Extra Attention to Hand Hygiene
Wearing gloves – an intervention designed to protect patients and providers from pathogen exposure – is counter-intuitively associated with poor hand hygiene. Hand hygiene rates are almost universally lower when healthcare providers use glo...
Closing the Gap Between Hand Hygiene Perception & Reality
Healthcare workers commonly estimate their hand hygiene compliance before touching a patient to be nearly 80%. In actuality, compliance is often as low as 12%, according to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Infection Prevention. Providers simp...
Technology Alone Can’t Keep Patients Safe: The RaDonda Vaught Case
When a Tennessee court found nurse RaDonda Vaught guilty of criminally negligent homicide, nurses everywhere cringed. They could only too easily see themselves in Vaught’s shoes. Vaught, an experienced intensive care nurse, accidentally admin...
Leapfrog Updates Hand Hygiene Monitoring Requirement for 2022
The Leapfrog Group is offering hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers an alternative path to meeting the organization’s Hand Hygiene Standard. On March 14, 2022, Leapfrog released its Summary of Changes to the 2022 Leapfrog Hospital Survey & ...
Nurse Reacts to Electronic Hand Hygiene System
By Jennifer L.W. Fink, RN, BSN “This? This is a thing for nurses?” TikTokker @TheNurseErica steps aside, revealing an electronic hand hygiene system. Her skepticism and sarcasm are clearly on display. And you know what? I don’t blame her. Long-...
Leapfrog Hand Hygiene Survey: 3 Surprising Facts
You know how important your Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is to your institution’s reputation and functioning. And you know that the Leapfrog Hand Hygiene Survey contributes to your facility’s safety grade. You probably also know that Leapfrog h...
4 Ways Technology Makes an Infection Preventionist’s Job Easier
“Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.” ― Joseph Wood Krutch, American author Infection preventionists have a vitally important job: they’re charged with preventing the spread of infe...
Hand Hygiene: Move Beyond Measurement and Nurture Change
Weighing a chicken doesn’t make it fatter. That piece of wisdom comes from William Bornstein, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Quality and Patient Safety Officer for Emory Healthcare. It might seem strange for a medical doctor to “weigh i...