Has your hospital been impacted by The Joint Commission’s new 2018 standards for hand hygiene yet? As you probably know, the new standards represent a major change in how your organization is evaluated. With the old standards, you just had to have a system in place to improve hand hygiene. Under the new standards, you now have to ensure that your staff is actually performing hand hygiene…just having a system in place won’t cut it.
Now that we’re a little more than 10 months out from the new standards, we wanted to take a moment to share the experiences of two of our hospital partners that underwent Joint Commission surveys recently.
One of the hospitals has the Clean Hands – Safe Hands system in some units but not others. In a unit without our system, a Joint Commission surveyor observed a clinician fail to clean their hands when they were supposed to. As predicted, the hospital was immediately cited as a deficiency resulting in a Requirement for Improvement.
Another hospital partner that used our system as part of a research study presented the data and their revamped observation program to The Joint Commission. Because of the unique nature of the study, their hand hygiene rates were not 100%, but they still got a special commendation. In fact, the surveyors went on record saying that this was the best hand hygiene program they had ever seen.
Two hospitals with two different results…one got their hand slapped and the other received a high five. Which would you prefer?
If you’d like to explore how our system typically doubles hand hygiene performance rates…and has reduced HAIs by between 45% and 81% in 100% of customers following our process for 6 months…download our whitepaper to discover the process. Or here’s a brief video about how the system works.
