Hand Hygiene

Infection Control Today asked members of industry to describe the importance of patient involvement in hand hygiene and suggest some best practices for implementation into an existing hospital-based hand hygiene program.

The healing hands of a healthcare professional too often bear the risk of spreading infection while administering care. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), failure to engage in proper hand hygiene is the leading cause of healthcare-associated infections and the spread of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs), including vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile. Unfortunately, proper hand hygiene can be easily forgotten by busy healthcare workers. A study of 2,834 opportunities for hand hygiene found that hands were cleansed only 48 percent of the time, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report (2009).

A new study published in BMJ conducted by investigators at two large hospitals in The Netherlands shows that a trained dog was able to detect Clostridium difficile with high estimated sensitivity and specificity, both in stool samples and in hospital patients infected with C. difficile.

A startling number of Americans may be putting their health at risk by not practicing good hand hygiene. When asked about their specific handwashing habits, a vast majority of adults (71 percent) say they regularly wash their hands, but that number may be grossly exaggerated. Nearly 6 in 10 (58 percent) admit that they have witnessed others leaving a public restroom without washing their hands. More than one-third of Americans (35 percent) have witnessed co-workers leaving facilities without washing, and 1 in 5 consumers surveyed (20 percent) have witnessed restaurant employees not washing their hands at all. The worst offenders seem to be men by a significant margin.