Hand-hygiene campaign ready for launch
Tuesday October 9, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Following a successful pilot of hand-hygiene tools from the World Health Organization (WHO) in 10 Canadian centres, the tools will be made available to all healthcare organizations Oct. 15.

A national hand-hygiene campaign themed Stop! Clean Your Hands, was initiated in May 2007 by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) in partnership with the Community and Hospital Infection Control Association - Canada, the Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation, and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Dr. Susan Brien, CPSI’s director of operations for Quebec, Atlantic Canada and Nunavut, says infection control issues are the second most common adverse events in Canada and proper hand-hygiene would prevent many of those infections.

“We know that only a multi-modal strategy will change behaviour,” says Brien about the campaign. In addition to providing campaign tools, CPSI is also offering supports to help organizations sustain their efforts.

This includes a web-based educational module which will be posted on the campaign’s website along with an adaptation of WHO tools designed to encourage campaign participation within individual organizations.

“We will also be partnering with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care in Ontario to facilitate train the trainer sessions that will help hospitals learn how to measure hand-hygiene,” Brien says.

“In the same way CPSI a couple of years ago partnered with Saskatchewan Health to promote nationally the root cause analysis, we’ll be doing the same work with Ontario with regard to the audit tool and measuring hand-hygiene compliance.”

Brien says these initiatives have helped place Canada on the leading edge of hand-hygiene internationally.

She, along with the hand-hygiene group from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, will be the only North American representatives at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland with representatives from other countries participating in the WHO’s hand-hygiene campaign.

Hand-hygiene facts from CPSI:

• Healthcare workers’ compliance with hand hygiene is considered to be less than 40 per cent on average
• Improved hand-hygiene could save Canadian hospitals with 1,600 beds up to $8 million a year
• Proper hand hygiene demonstrated by leaders has been shown to influence others hand hygiene positively by up to 70 per cent