News Review
Healthcare workers of the world unite . . . to wash their hands
Thursday October 18, 2007
Hand hygiene has been a major focal point for patient safety-conscience healthcare organizations in recent months, both in Canada and around the globe.

For starters, Canada’s first ever national hand hygiene campaign was officially launched Oct. 15 on the heels of Canadian Patient Safety Week 2007 (Oct. 8 to 13).

The campaign, Stop! Clean Your Hands, is being led by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI), and began as a pilot project initiated in 10 Canadian centres. With the pilot phase complete, the tools were unveiled to the rest of the country. A website, www.handhygiene.ca, has been launched in support of the campaign.

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 of the campaign. In addition to providing campaign tools, CPSI is also offering supports to help organizations sustain their efforts.

Although they weren’t part of the Stop! Clean Your Hands pilot phase, Baycrest, a Toronto-based healthcare organization and a Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC) subscriber, has also taken an active approach to keep hands clean.

As part of a project launched in 2006 to facilitate better hand-washing practices at its 472-bed long-term care home and 300-bed complex continuing-care hospital, Baycrest has started using an auditing system to measure the hand-hygiene compliance.

As part of the project, Baycrest also switched from gel-based hand sanitizer to a foam-based product – which is proven to be more effective in disease prevention.

For part of the next phase, Baycrest is installing counters inside its hand-sanitizer dispensers, which will calculate the number of times per day each is used.

This practice will continue after the pilot project is finished, says Chingiz Amirov, Baycrest’s director of infection prevention and control.

“Hand-hygiene has always been an important element of patient safety (and) is a global movement right now,” says Chingiz Amirov, Baycrest’s director of infection prevention and control. “By improving hand-hygiene we are saving the lives of people and preventing hospital-acquired infections.”

Hand hygiene has also been an issue in the international healthcare community, based on the involvement of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international healthcare bodies.

Acting under the auspices of the WHO, the Joint Commission’s International Centre for Patient Safety (ICPS) established an international steering committee made up of leaders and experts in patient safety to oversee the development of nine “life-saving” patient safety solutions as a way of reducing the number of avoidable deaths and injuries in hospitals.

One of the nine solutions is improved hand hygiene. A pilot program to measure the effectiveness of the solutions on the front-lines is also underway.

“These solutions offer to WHO member states a major new resource to assist their hospitals in avoiding preventable deaths and injuries,” Joint Commission president Dennis O’Leary said on the commission’s website.

Another initiative involving the WHO and several other international groups is High 5s, a project where seven WHO members states, including Canada, combine their expertise in five safety areas identified as needing improvement. One of these is promoting effective hand hygiene practices.

“By combining our efforts, the synergy is incredible in terms of the great ideas that are coming through,” says Paula Beard, CPSI’s acting director of operations (Ontario to British Columbia).

The High 5s initiative is currently in the planning phase which means ensuring the standardized operating protocols are ones the seven participating countries can integrate into their own systems. The second phase is to develop an evaluation strategy for defining success.

The third phase involves selecting pilot sites for the High 5s. In Canada, as in the other participating counties, up to 10 hospitals will be selected as pilot sites to test one or more of the five protocols.

The Canadian Patient Safety Institute will put out a call for organizations interested in participating in the pilot phase in 2008.

For the full story behind the hand hygiene projects mentioned above, click the links below.

Hand-hygiene campaign ready for launch

Baycrest to audit hand-washing

WHO promotes international patient safety solutions

International expertise collaborates on patient safety