Everyone has talked about the importance of hand hygiene for years, and two major organizations are now getting serious.
In case you missed it, starting this week, if a Joint Commission surveyor sees one individual fail to clean their hands one time, your hospital will be cited and will have to show improvement to maintain accreditation.
Over 10,000 people so far have read our article about The Joint Commission’s new, strict standard for hand hygiene (here it is on LinkedIn).
Coming on the heels of this announcement are new survey questions from The Leapfrog Group. They’re in the process of updating their 2018 Hospital Survey. Leapfrog is considering adding two fact-finding questions to find out if hospitals are using electronic hand hygiene or video monitoring systems.
These governing bodies are realizing what we’ve always known – that Direct Observation doesn’t work (read why here and here). New, higher standards are being put into place to ensure that hand hygiene is both being measured accurately and is continuously improving.
The question is, is your hospital ready to adopt the new gold standard for patient safety, or are you going to wait and play catch-up later?
If you’d like to explore how our system typically doubles hand hygiene performance rates, here’s a brief video about how it works, and here’s a white paper on our process of continual, positive behavior change.
