Hand hygiene is cleansing and disinfecting our hands through either handwashing with soap and water or using an alcohol-based hand rub. Hand hygiene should be performed before and after touching a patient or certain patient care items.
Our hands can transmit many germs that can lead to infections and illnesses.. A great way to keep ourselves and our patients healthy is to make sure we use good hand hygiene.
We observe our staff to make sure everyone is washing or disinfecting their hands before going into a patient’s room and as they exit the room. We follow these metrics every month and create graphs and charts to measure how we are improving over time so we can compare ourselves to other hospitals.
We have established an auditing process where we can count how many times we have been successful washing our hands going in the patient’s room and exiting the patient’s room. We have required education for every single staff member and even parents/caregivers to help everyone understand the importance of hand hygiene. We measure how well we perform these processes and share these metrics with all of our teams.
