Improving Hand Hygiene Compliance in Healthcare Settings
Hand hygiene compliance is one of the most important factors in preventing healthcare-associated infections and keeping patients safe. The many barriers to proper hand hygiene and complexity of manual hand hygiene audits pose a challenge for healthcare providers, but solutions for improvement are available.
What is hand hygiene compliance?
Hand hygiene compliance occurs when healthcare providers follow best practices for hand hygiene procedures. According to the CDC, “Hand hygiene procedures include the use of alcohol-based hand rubs (containing 60%–95% alcohol) and hand washing with soap and water.” The CDC notes that hand hygiene should be performed before and after treating a patient, after touching objects likely to be contaminated with bodily fluids such as blood and saliva, before regloving, or after using gloves that have been torn or punctured.
Why is hand hygiene compliance important?
According to the World Health Organization, “thousands of people die every day around the world from infections acquired while receiving health care” and that “hands are the main pathways of germ transmission during health care.” Hand hygiene compliance is critical to preventing the spread of these health-care associated infections (HAIs), which are prevalent in hospital settings; according to the CDC, in any given day about one in 31 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection.
These HAIs are detrimental to patient safety and damage patient trust in hospitals and healthcare in general. Patients want to know their hospital is capable of providing care safely, and an outbreak of HAIs can erode that confidence. Feelings about healthcare in your community can quickly turn negative if the problem is not rectified, and damage the hospital’s bottom line.
Industry ratings like the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade also factor in hand hygiene and can influence patient trust. Health plans, transparency vendors, and employers all use Leapfrog Safety Grade to help consumers choose the safest hospital. This puts low graded hospitals at risk of losing patient traffic, and for good reason; patients at “D” and “F” hospitals face a 92% greater risk of avoidable death.
Learn more about hand hygiene and Leapfrog requirements.
Because of its role in preventing HAIs, strong hand hygiene compliance is one of the best ways for hospitals to keep patients safe. According to Dr. Julie Gerberding, former director of the CDC, “Clean hands are the single most important factor in preventing the spread of dangerous germs and antibiotic resistance in health care settings. More widespread use of these products that improve adherence to recommended hand hygiene practices will promote patient safety and prevent infections.”
Barriers to hand hygiene compliance
Unfortunately for healthcare providers, there are many barriers to hand hygiene compliance. According to the CDC, studies show that on average, “healthcare providers clean their hands less than half of the times they should.” This behavior obviously puts patients at increased risk of HAIs — so why aren’t providers cleaning their hands?
In WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care: First Global Patient Safety Challenge Clean Care Is Safer Care, the authors found a number of “perceived barriers to adherence with hand hygiene practice recommendations”, including:
- skin irritation caused by hand hygiene agents
- inaccessible hand hygiene supplies
- interference with HCW–patient relationships
- patient needs perceived as a priority over hand hygiene
- wearing of gloves
- forgetfulness
- lack of knowledge of guidelines
- insufficient time for hand hygiene
- high workload and understaffing
- lack of scientific information showing a definitive impact of improved hand hygiene on HCAI rates
Many of these issues could be addressed by making sure that healthcare providers are held accountable for hand hygiene compliance, but this can be hard to track manually. The process of collecting and compiling hand hygiene data is time-intensive, and manual audits are flawed and prone to human error. Healthcare settings need to incorporate a solution that tracks compliance of hand hygiene best practices and provides the data to back it up and drive improvements.
Hand hygiene solutions
An electronic hand hygiene monitoring solution can help healthcare providers follow hand hygiene best practices. An electronic solution provides intelligence about your hospital’s compliance and clinical workflows, which allows you to track compliance history and work more efficiently. But BioVigil is unlike other electronic hand hygiene solutions in that it provides a gentle reminder sequence on a user-worn badge to perform hand hygiene, if you forget. The combination of these reminders, plus the awareness feature of a green, yellow, and red light, have proven to significantly increase hand hygiene compliance.
BioVigil has been proven to sustain 97%+ hand hygiene compliance, making a notable impact on healthcare-associated infections and patient satisfaction. Outcomes for BioVigil include:
- 45% reduction in CLABSI and CAUTI
- 60% reduction in C. diff rates
- Reduction in overall HAIs by up to 83%
- Increasing patient satisfaction from 35th to 97th percentile
Interested in learning more? See our customer outcomes here.