Adherence to hand hygiene requirements in healthcare facilities remains low, even though there is a clear link between hand hygiene and reducing healthcare-associated infections.
Hospitals and health systems looking to improve their hand hygiene compliance rates can focus on the following four big-picture strategies, laid out in new guidelines by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America and expanded on in a DebMed blog post:
1. Increase access to and acceptance of hand sanitizer and soaps. When hand hygiene products are easy to access, compliance with requirements improves. The blog post points out that sanitizer dispensers should be available at the point of care, not just on the unit or in a work area, to be compliant with the World Health Organization Five Moments of Hand Hygiene.
2. Promote a disciplined approach to compliance. The plan to increase hand hygiene compliance must be more involved than reminding caregivers to wash their hands. Instead, the blog post recommends informing, educating and training healthcare workers on either the WHO's Five Moments of Hand Hygiene or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's hand hygiene guidelines. "Only by insisting on the highest clinical standards will [organizations] ensure hand hygiene compliance and protect the safety and well-being of patients, families and providers," the blog post states.
3. Monitor and evaluate progress. Some hospitals may choose to move beyond the more traditional observation method — which has its limitations — to electronic forms of compliance monitoring, according to the post.
4. Build hand hygiene compliance into the culture of patient safety. "The name of the game is caregiver empowerment," according to the blog post. "That, in turn, calls for multidisciplinary task forces and committees with the knowledge, skill and talent to design, promote and evaluate hand hygiene compliance programs."