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Studies have shown that although compliance rates are improving, 50% of health care workers in the United States fail to consistently wash their hands between patients (cite).
Compliance rates in many developing countries are even lower, and these lapses in good hand hygiene no doubt lead to hundreds of thousands of HAIs (Hospital Acquired Infections) every year (see HAI: Hospital Acquired Infections).
So today, May 5th, is promoted by the World Health Organization as global CLEAN YOUR HANDS DAY - to encourage HCWs (Healthcare workers) to improve and sustain hand hygiene practices around the world.
Clean Care is Safer Care
First Global Patient Safety Challenge
Clean Care is Safer Care
The goal of Clean Care is Safer Care is to ensure that infection control is acknowledged universally as a solid and essential basis towards patient safety and supports the reduction of health care-associated infections and their consequences.
As a global campaign to improve hand hygiene among health-care workers, SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands is a major component of Clean Care is Safer Care. It advocates the need to improve and sustain hand hygiene practices of health-care workers at the right times and in the right way to help reduce the spread of potentially life-threatening infections in health-care facilities.
Below you’ll find some resources from the WHO, including posters, PDF files, and articles on today’s activities.
Five Moments for Hand Hygiene
The newly developed Five Moments for Hand Hygiene has emerged from the WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care (Advanced Draft) to add value to any hand hygiene improvement strategy. Quite simply, it defines the key moments for hand hygiene, overcoming misleading language and complicated descriptions. It presents a unified vision and promotes a strong sense of ownership.
Not only does the Five Moments align with the evidence base concerning the spread of HAI but it is interwoven with the natural workflow of care and is designed to be easy to learn, logical and applicable in a wide range of settings. Find out more about your Five Moments by clicking the links below.
Tools for 5 Moments - English
Semmelweis Revisited
(excerpted from an earlier blog)
One hundred and sixty-four years ago, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis published a controversial medical book called Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.
Childbed, or puerperal fever, was a major cause of mortality and morbidity among postpartum women, and Semmelweis demonstrated in his Viennese hospital that its incidence could be greatly reduced by having doctors wash their hands before performing gynecological exams.
His theories were considered radical (Pasteur wouldn’t come up with his `germ theory’ for another 17 years), and went against all currently accepted medical science. Diseases, as everyone knew, were caused by imbalances in one of the `four humours’ in the body, to be cured by bloodletting, and had nothing at all to do with washing one’s hands.
Besides, it was outrageous to suggest that doctors might actually be causing disease and death among their patients.
Semmelweis was ridiculed, ostracized and eventually forced to leave his hospital post. He moved to Pest, and frustrated by the lack of acceptance of his theories, often denounced the medical community.
His fortunes and reputation suffered greatly due to his unrelenting advocacy of hand hygiene.
Eventually, he was committed to an asylum, a broken man, where he died at the age of 47. It was only in the years after his death, with the addition of Pasteur’s findings, that his theories became universally accepted.
Incredibly, and despite 150 years of evidence of proven efficacy, doctors and health care professionals around the world are still not as diligent with hand washing as they should be.
And those lapses cost thousands of lives, and billions of dollars in additional medical expenses, every year.
This from the CDC on HAI’s (Hospital Acquired Infections)
CDC strives to understand how healthcare-associated infections happen and to develop appropriate interventions. A new report from CDC updates previous estimates of healthcare-associated infections. In American hospitals alone, healthcare-associated infections account for an estimated 1.7 million infections and 99,000 associated deaths each year. Of these infections:
- 32 percent of all healthcare-associated infection are urinary tract infections
- 22 percent are surgical site infections
- 15 percent are pneumonia (lung infections)
- 14 percent are bloodstream infections
And this is just the United States, globally the numbers are much, much higher.
Sadly, many of these complications could have been prevented by more stringent hand hygiene.
