Clinicians are at the center of every process in the hospital. As a result, no initiative can be successful without staff engagement. From caring for patients to implementing new state of the art technology, if the clinicians aren’t engaged, failure is likely.
At Clean Hands – Safe Hands, we know a thing or two about the importance of staff engagement. Our system was invented by clinicians for clinicians. We do everything we can to get clinicians excited and engaged about the system from the start. This includes slowly rolling out the system so as not to overwhelm, hosting fun and interactive competitions, and even sending our team on to the unit to discuss the system and any concerns with clinicians.
Unfortunately, clinicians are busy people. As a result, staff engagement can slip over time. While a dip in staff engagement is perfectly normal, it’s also extremely important to get back on track. Clean Hands – Safe Hands makes detecting changes in staff engagement quick and easy, and there’s even a surprisingly simple solution to improving staff engagement.
Clinical vital signs are leading indicators of a patient’s health – these key data points help healthcare providers quickly identify any indications that a patient’s health is trending in the wrong direction.
In similar fashion, Clean Hands – Safe Hands has a Vital Signs Dashboard™ that reports on staff engagement. Are unit managers logging into the system to review hand hygiene performance? Are they checking their emails? Are they discussing hand hygiene data in their shift huddles? Are nurses wearing their badges?
These questions can all be answered quickly by logging in and checking the Vital Signs Dashboard™. This easy to read dashboard shows hospital leadership how engaged their staff is with the Clean Hands – Safe Hands system. If any metrics start to drop, they can be addressed before a decline in hand hygiene and increase in infections occurs.
Just like clinical vital signs, these data points are indicators that help identify risks before they become problematic.
Surprisingly, one of the biggest factors in improving (and sustaining) hand hygiene performance is simple: talking about it.
This chart shows real data from one of our hospital customers. The vertical axis measures their hand hygiene performance rate – the baseline is an index around 100. The horizontal axis shows the performance by week. The blue line marks where the staff began discussing hand hygiene daily. They would share hand hygiene tips and best practices, and more importantly, they would share data.
First, during a morning huddle, reports would be shown for every shift change so each provider could see their shift’s performance over time, as well as recognize top performers. Second, unit leadership would use the Performance Bubble Plots™ and Real-Time Intervention Blueprints™ to have targeted conversations as necessary.
Talking about hand hygiene and hand hygiene boosts staff engagement– it absolutely helps to increase and sustain high performance. For the hospital shown above, hand hygiene performance increased 20-30% due to these important conversations.
In order to achieve success in any project, clinical staff engagement is essential. Clean Hands – Safe Hands makes keeping a finger on the pulse of staff engagement easy. First, hospital leadership can log on to the Vital Signs Dashboard™ to make sure unit leaders and coaches are logging in, checking the data, and pulling reports. Next, unit leaders and coaches can take this data and share it in huddles and one on one with staff. Using an integrated approach of data and discussion to improve hand hygiene has proven time and time to be extremely successful.
If you would like to learn more about the connection between staff engagement and hand hygiene, contact us.
