Bluewater committed to reducing infections
Wednesday December 12, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Helen Shaw says Bluewater Health in Sarnia signed up for a national hand hygiene campaign due to their interest in best practices and because they’d identified hand hygiene as a patient safety concern.

Bluewater Health is one of 13 Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC) subscribers taking part in STOP! Clean Your Hands, a national hand-hygiene campaign organized by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, the Canadian Council of Health Services Accreditation, the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Community and Hospital Infection Control Association of Canada.

Shaw, the infection control co-ordinator at Bluewater, says the idea to participate in the campaign came from Nora Boyd, Shaw’s predecessor who championed the idea and left Shaw to continue the campaign after taking employment with another organization.  

“Our hand-hygiene here is not any better than it is anywhere else,” Shaw says. “We found that out through audits that were done and we want to improve on that to improve our patient safety (and) to improve our transmission of infections.”

Some of the tools and resources Bluewater is accessing through the campaign include signage, staff education sessions and a switch from an alcohol-based gel sanitizer to a foam sanitizer, which staff finds less abrasive on the hands.

As for the education sessions, Shaw says anyone working in patient rooms took part.

“With that education, we’re also giving them, at least in the nursing units, the rate of transmission for MRSA and C. difficile for their specific units so they can see if there has been improvement in any area (of infection control),” Shaw says.

Not only does this help spread best practices around the organization, but seeing transmission rates on a monthly basis helps keep staff motivated.

Starting in December, Bluewater is beginning staff hand-hygiene audits to see if there has been an improvement in hand-hygiene compliance rates as a result of the campaign.

For the audit process at Bluewater, infection control staff is taking an overt approach.

“We’re going into the units and actually observing from a limited time,” Shaw says. “We’re going to do that in 20-minute sessions on each floor before moving to another unit.”

Confined to 20-minute timeframes, infection control staff will follow workers into patient rooms and count the number of times hand hygiene should have been exercised versus the number of times it is.

Although she feels Bluewater has benefited from campaign participation, Shaw also has a few ideas for the organizers.

For one, she would like to see a greater variety in signage.

“The signage is good and people are aware of it when it first goes up but then people do get tired of looking — they don’t even see it anymore,” she says, suggests rotating signage to maintain people’s interest in the campaign.

Another idea is to simplify the auditing process.

“We’ve made our own audit tool to make it less complicated to do the hand-hygiene audit. I think that it can be pared-down,” Shaw says. “But we are a smaller hospital so that’s just my opinion.”