Hand hygiene a major focus for HIROC subscribers in 2008
Hand-washing campaigns and education mark a year of successes
Wednesday December 24, 2008 -- Deron Hamel
Bolstering hand hygiene practices and reinforcing the importance of clean hands in all healthcare settings was a major theme for Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC) subscribers throughout 2008.

Healthcare subscribers travelled many different avenues during the past year to ensure they were doing everything possible to help foster safe environments.

In January, Lake of the Woods District Hospital announced upon the completion of Ontario’s Just Clean Your Hands campaign — an initiative aimed at strengthening hand-hygiene practices in healthcare environments — that it would continue to keep its hand-hygiene committee active, due to a 25 per cent increase in hand-washing compliance during the nine-month project.

The project saw the installation of hand sanitizer dispensers at every patient’s bedside, baseline surveys for healthcare workers to complete on hand hygiene, as well as focus groups for physicians and healthcare workers.

“We need to find ways to incorporate proper hand hygiene into daily practice and find ways to improve upon it in the future,” Susan McLeod, a registered practical nurse and project co-ordinator of the Provincial Hand Hygiene Improvement Program at the Kenora hospital, told Axiom News.

Upon seeing the successes of the Just Clean Your Hands campaign, the province and the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) cemented a partnership in March to expand the program to additional healthcare providers.

From this partnership came educational opportunities to help increase the rate of hand washing by training hand-hygiene committees on best practices.

In the summer, Baycrest ran the Helping Hands campaign, an initiative to foster hand hygiene. This program focused on educating residents in Baycrest’s long-term care home about the role hand hygiene plays in creating a safe environment.

Volunteers came to the home to distribute information leaflets detailing the importance of hand washing and providing samples of hand sanitizers.

“This approach is an example of how people are using different ideas” to educate people about hand hygiene, says Jane Van Toen, an infection-control practitioner at Baycrest.

Earlier this year a survey was conducted to determine the frequency of healthcare providers initiating hand-hygiene policies.

In November, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reported that 99 per cent of 103 Ontario hospitals that took part in the survey indicated they had established hand-hygiene policies.

Dr. Michael Gardam, the medical director at the University Health Network in Toronto characterizes this as a success.

“In recent years, limiting the spread of hospital-acquired infection has become a major focus of patient safety campaigns across the country,” says Gardam, referring to hand hygiene campaigns such as Just Clean Your Hands and STOP! Clean Your Hands.

“The results of this survey offer a rare chance to see how these campaigns are changing the culture of Ontario’s hospitals and creating a safer environment for patients.”

Do you have a story you would like to share about a patient safety initiative? If so, please contact the newsroom at 800-294-0051 ext. 23, or e-mail deron(at)axiomnews.ca.

If you have feedback on this artilce, please contact the newsroom by phoning 800-294-0051, ext. 23, or e-mail deron(at)axiomnews.ca.