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ISSUE: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Guideline for Hand Hygiene
in Health Care Settings recommends monitoring adherence to hand hygiene and providing
feedback to staff. We wanted to do this and determine accurate baseline compliance
rates for all direct patient care areas but lacked infection control (IC) staffing
to accomplish this goal. We also feared that results would be positively skewed if
IC staff did the monitors.
PROJECT: We utilized a high school student seeking healthcare-related work experience
to conduct hand hygiene monitors in all direct patient care areas. We provided the
student comprehensive education on hand hygiene requirements and developed a standardized
hand hygiene data collection tool. The student spent 2 hours in each direct patient
care area observing and documenting hand hygiene practices of staff. IC staff reviewed
all data collected and provided feedback on compliance rate and additional education
on areas for improvement to the manager of each area monitored. We sent cumulative
results by discipline to nursing and physician executive leadership.
RESULTS: Over a 6-week period, our student spent approximately 90 hours observing
hand hygiene practices of 67 physicians and 201 nurses in 23 different direct patient
care settings. All direct patient care areas were monitored at least twice. The overall
compliance rate of physicians and nurses in meeting hand hygiene requirements was
54% and 70%, respectively. The greatest learning opportunity identified for improvement
for all staff is to use hand hygiene before touching patients and after touching patient
equipment.
LESSONS LEARNED: Utilizing a student to conduct initial labor-intensive baseline hand
hygiene monitors permitted our program to achieve its goal of determining a baseline
compliance rate for all direct patient care areas. Furthermore, we judge that compliance
was more realistically assessed by the student, who was relatively unknown to staff,
than by IC staff. Finally, utilizing this strategy allowed more effective use of IC
staffing resources to analyze the data and provide direct feedback and education to
the patient care areas on their hand hygiene practices.
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Publication history
Abstract ID 50838Tuesday, June 21
Identification
Copyright
© 2005 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
