Hand Hygiene In Acute Care

Hand hygiene practices are important thing to infection prevention and control practice. As health provider especially ED staff or front liner, to follow hand washing protocols is necessary in any situation. According Practice Standard (2009) four major elements to preventing practice; hand washing, protective barriers, care of equipment and health practice of nurse. Cite from Health Promotion Agency for Northern Ireland, scientists has found around 45% of infections can be prevented by washing hands regularly. MOH (2010) increasing in hand-washing compliance by

Another problem that goes with the lack of hand-hygiene compliance is the many excuses that healthcare workers use to avoid washing their hands. Hass and Larson summarize (2009) some of the barriers to adherence that healthcare workers use, “a lack of access to hand-washing sinks, insufficient time, skin irritations, and lack of accountability” (Hass & Larson, 2009). Some solutions they explain to combat the barriers are to put more alcohol-based sanitizers where sinks are not around and placing them all over the patient care areas also reduces time and can be a suitable way for proper hand hygiene if the healthcare worker’s hand is not soiled. They also describe, “Involve staff in trying several alcohol-based hand sanitizers before deciding on one, and involve employee health services in creating a plan to manage hand-skin problems among staff. Alcohol-based sanitizers that have lotion in them can be helpful for staff who have very sensitive skin” (Hass & Larson, 2009).

Roy, L. (2016). Maintaining hand hygiene to prevent the transmission of infection. Journal of Aesthetic Nursing, 5(6),

Keeping our hands clean is one of the most effcient and important steps we can do as humans to avoid getting sick or spreading germs to other people. Unwashed hands spread many diseases such as the flue, E. coli, and salmonella. Unfortunately, hand hygiene is still one of today’s most leading causes of infection in health care facilities. The risk of clinicians, patients, and visitors not complying with hand hygiene protocols creates a practice problem for nurses and their patient care. The cause of health care infections, also known as, health care-associated infections (HAIs) are increasing along with the rise of the inability to control or treat infections that are multi-drug resistant. Lack of proper hand hygiene is a major problem in clinical settings sourcing from critical care divisions where the most contaminations are prevalent. This paper will discuss how hand hygiene affects the nursing process and solutions of how to better prevent HAIs within the nursing scope of practice.

CDCs clean hands count campaign aim to improve healthcare provide adherence to hand hygiene recommendations, address, myths and misperceptions about hand hygiene and empower patients to play a role in their care by asking or reminding healthcare providers to clean their hands and the most germs that cause serious infections in healthcare are spread by people’s action, every patient is at risk of getting an infection while they are being treated for something else, hand hygiene is a great way to prevent infections and healthcare providers clean their hands less than half of the time they should, good hand washing is the first line of defense against the spread of many illness.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of hand hygiene and how it decreases the transmission of infection throughout (Bloomfield, Aiello, Cookson, O'Boyle, & Larson, 2007). Handwashing can include alcohol based hygiene items and handwashing with soap and water. This study main focus was on North American and Europe. There is plenty of supporting rationale to backup why this study was conducted. Some of the few things this study wanted to achieve are hand hygiene is key to staying healthy and reducing infection. This needs to be followed both in the workplace and around the community to abstain from infections. Handwashing can be achieved by soap and water or hand sanitizers that removes or eliminates many microorganisms on the surface of the hand (de Oliveira Dourado, da Costa Barros, Diogo de Vasconcelos, & da Silva Santos, 2017). This can impact many individuals by using this technique to keep foreign germs off of the hands. The importance of washing hands

After the program, there is an increase in level of knowledge (79% to 91% to correctly identify hand washing guideline) about the hand washing issue and an increase in compliance rate (51% to 83%). The participants in the study have positive attitudes towards hand washing, before and after the program, suggesting that it is fine for a patient to remind his or her doctors to wash their hands. This study suggests an immediate rearrangement of the alcohol hand rub at each patient’s bedside, and a ongoing issue regarding caregivers’ skin irritation that has to be addressed quickly. Overall, the research shows that increasing hand washing compliance rate is a multifaceted problems that have to be addressed in multiple ways, from the position of the alcohol hand rub to the hand rub that do not irritate the healthcare workers’

Hand hygiene has been an issue that needed enhancement. In the United States (US), 1in every 25 patients admitted in the hospital turn out to be infected, making it a total of 722,000 infections each year (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2016). These infections can be critical and very unsusceptible to treatment. Proper hand hygiene can be used to inhibit the transmission of disease-causing agents. Healthcare workers (HCWs) should exercise proper hand hygiene to inhibit the circulation of germs to patients. Hand hygiene should be done prior to patient contact, following contact with blood, body fluids, or non-sanitized surfaces, prior to invasive procedures, following taking off gloves and patient 's contacts. In

The number of health-care associated infections and patient safety must be addressed and improved by actions and plans that can be implemented as soon as possible. Estimates indicate that hundreds of millions of patients contract these infections worldwide on a yearly basis. This article outlines the need for hand hygiene in order to prevent and control healthcare-associated infections (also referred to as HCAI’s). It states that a large number of HCAI’s are preventable, and measures regarding strict observance of hand hygiene methods must be taken. In October 2004, from all corners of the globe, patient groups, governmental agencies and policy-makers held a meeting advance the patient safety goal of "first, do no harm” and to essentially promote

Conceptual/theoretical framework. The authors indicated that the concept behind their research is to identify omissions in hand hygiene practices to further strengthen the protocol instilled by CDC (Chau et al., 2011). There is appropriate reasoning behind the conduction of their analysis due to the strict enforcement by the CDC. Additionally, more information is needed to understand the theoretical framework for this

Healthcare associated infections have an impact on patients - how? Can be prevented greatly with compliance to hand hygiene protocols (REF).

The Royal College of Nursing lists hand hygiene as one of its ‘Standard infection control precautions.’ These essential principles provide the foundation of safe practice, thus protecting staff and clients from harmful micro-organisms that may cause infection. (2012, p. 8) HCAI’s (healthcare associated infections) are one of the most important public health issues worldwide and cause hundreds of unnecessary fatalities annually. The prevalence of these infections is highest an

The main priority in my workplace is to protect the patients, visitors and staff from the risk of acquiring a hospital-associated infection. Most of our patients are immune-compromised due to treatment or disease, so we introduced a zero tolerance approach to poor hand hygiene. It is universally recognized that the hands are the primary source of cross-infection and good hand washing techniques are the main factor to prevent infection (Weston, 2013). We have enforced good hand hygiene practice by ensuring that all staff members are up to date with the mandatory yearly training and observing the 5 moments of hand hygiene. Family/visitors of patients are

According to WHO (2009), there are several studies that provide quantitative evaluation of budget savings via hand hygiene promotion programs. Pittet et al, (2000) conducted a study to assess the direct and indirect effects of the hand hygiene promotion program. He observed that the hand hygiene program saves money even if the reduction of HAI is less than 1%. Although hand hygiene is considered the most effective, simple and cheap infection control measure, hand washing in developing countries in general is viewed as suboptimal. For example, the hand hygiene compliance rate in Turkey is less than 33% (Alp et al, 2011) and in Ethiopia, it is 38.7% (WHO,

The solution to increasing hand-washing compliance does not have a simple, one fix-all answer. Instead, there are a few small ways that can contribute to increasing our hand-washing compliance. Some LHSC locations have made significant progress in compliance rates however, there is still room to improve towards the goal of 100 per cent compliance. Figure 1 provides a graphical representation of the average hand-washing compliance rates for moments 1 and 4 in relation to LHSC’s goal. The compliance rates displayed are shown as an average for the University Hospital and Victoria Hospital.