Hand Hygiene Monograph Released by The Joint Commission

To help healthcare organizations target their efforts in measuring hand hygiene performance, The Joint Commission is releasing “Measuring Hand Hygiene Adherence: Overcoming the Challenges.”         

 The monograph is the result of a two-year collaboration with major infection control leadership organizations in the United States and abroad to identify effective approaches for measuring adherence to hand hygiene guidelines in healthcare organizations. In addition to The Joint Commission, the participating organizations include the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. (APIC), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the World Health Organization (WHO) World Alliance for Patient Safety, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID).

Measuring compliance with hand hygiene practices has long been complicated because of the need to monitor the practices of many different care providers in numerous locations for sufficient periods of time. Without standardized approaches to measuring hand hygiene performance, it is impossible to determine whether overall performance is improving, deteriorating or unchanged as new strategic interventions are introduced. The Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals require accredited organizations to follow recognized hand hygiene guidelines; however, studies continue to show that adherence to these guidelines is lacking. This is due, in part, to the variation in approaches to measurement, which makes rates of adherence difficult to compare.