Category Archives: Blog
How to Successfully Introduce a Large-Scale Hand Hygiene Improvement Initiative
Initiating a coordinated hand hygiene improvement initiative in a large healthcare system is not as difficult as you may think. Certainly, there are challenges involved when introducing any kind of change in an organization with thousands of employee...
Adaptive Room Modes: Real-Time, Actionable Feedback that Adjusts to Clinical Workflows
Nurses have no patience for hand hygiene systems that interfere with their clinical workload. Given the choice between missing hand hygiene but performing timely, necessary care or diligently performing hand hygiene but missing the opportunity to pro...
What to Expect from Healthcare in 2022
Forget “normal.” Nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, with new variants popping up around the globe, one thing is abundantly clear: Every aspect of our lives has been affected by the presence of a virus that was previously unknown. Health...
Tying Executive Compensation to Hand Hygiene? Be Careful.
Should nurse managers get a financial bonus if their units achieve excellence in hand hygiene? Should hospital leaders be penalized if hand hygiene rates remain low? Maybe. The current Leapfrog Hand Hygiene survey asks if “senior administrative lea...
5 Common Mistakes That Will Impact Your Leapfrog Hand Hygiene Survey
Want to earn a top Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade? Pour some extra effort into avoiding these five common mistakes that can negatively affect your rating on the Leapfrog Hand Hygiene survey: 1. Failing to monitor all bedside areas The Leapfrog ...
Re-emphasize Nurse Rounding to Improve Outcomes and Patient Satisfaction
NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest municipal hospital system in the United States, minimized the number of times nurses entered patients’ rooms early in the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time — when personal protective equipment (PPE) was in s...
Empowering Patients to Speak Up About Hand Hygiene
Patients are an important part of the hand hygiene equation. The CDC website reminds patients that they “can play a role in asking and reminding healthcare providers to clean their hands,” and the latest Leapfrog hand hygiene standards include as...
The Power of Voice: Why Verbal Reminders So Effectively Improve Hand Hygiene
Most healthcare technologies use alarms to signal a need to take action. But busy healthcare providers, overwhelmed by the ubiquity of alarms in clinical settings, quickly learn to adjust their attention and often ignore the alarms. Alarm fatig...
Contact Tracing: Halt Infections by Identifying the Source
Tis the season for respiratory infections. COVID-19 cases are already high in much of the country, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza infections typically increase in fall and winter. Accurately identifying potential sources of...
How Gamification Increases Hand Hygiene Performance
Gamification – the process of adding games to a task to encourage participation and enhance motivation – can effectively boost all kinds of healthy behaviors, including hand hygiene. Since Nick Pelling, a computer programmer, coined the term “g...