Going Touchless is a High-Tech Solution to Hand Hygiene Compliance

Kelly² continues, “Hospital staff can’t be expected to guard washrooms against those who use the toilet, neglect to wash their hands and then go on to touch other public surfaces, such as restroom door handles, before heading back to the hospital operating rooms or other patient areas. For this reason, even the most careful hand-washers are still at risk for contamination simply by touching a door handle used by someone who didn’t wash. For many hospitals, creating a touchless environment has boosted the level of staff comfort concerning the washroom, in many cases allowing them to use the facilities without touching even one surface from the time the enter the washroom to the time they exit. These include: auto-on and auto-off faucets; automatic, self-flushing toilets and urinals; auto-on and auto-off soap dispensers; automatic paper towel dispensers; and toilet seat covers activated by the touch of a button.”

“Touchless technology is a good idea, because hard surfaces are significant transfer points for bacteria and viruses,” says Charles Gerba, PhD, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Much of what people put down on a surface can be picked up by the next person who comes along, and in an age where people share more spaces and surfaces than ever before, touchless technology can help prevent cross-contamination.”

It is intuitive to think that the less a potentially contaminated surface is touched, the better, so the advent of automated sink fixtures as well as soap and towel dispensers has been heralded as an important way to reduce the opportunities for cross contamination and hand carriage of pathogenic micoorganisms. But how many clinicians consider the role that handwashing stations play in opportunities for cross-contamination?

As experts debate the role inanimate objects play in the transmission of infectious agents, few would doubt that the contamination of environmental surfaces such as handwashing sinks is a major issue. “Clearly inanimate surfaces play a role, particularly with organisms such as vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) and Clostridium difficile,” says Columbia University’s Elaine Larson, RN, PhD, FAAN, CIC.³ “But it seems pretty clear that direct contact (i.e., person-to-person touching) remains the most important mode of cross transmission. Nevertheless, housekeeping and environmental cleaning seem to have taken too much of a back seat and we need to re-emphasize the great importance of keeping the healthcare setting (as well as the people) free of a large microbial bioload.”³