Monday 8 December 2014: 5 moments of Hand Hygiene – are we a safety-focused organisation? After receiving the latest Hand Hygiene New Zealand National Hand Hygiene Performance Report this week, I found myself considering whether we are truly a safety-focused organisation? There are so many parts of what we do as part of the Canterbury Health System that provides superb patient focused care. However this latest report highlights an area where we are letting both ourselves and our patients down. We can do better! The latest Hand Hygiene New Zealand National Hand Hygiene Performance Report for DHBs was released this week. I was surprised and disappointed to see that our compliance with the 5 moments of hand hygiene has dropped. Take the time to do the right thing The World Health Organization states that cleaning your hands is the single most important thing you can do to stop the spread of disease. It’s not rocket science, but it does take time. Our patients rightly expect us, as a health organisation, to pay meticulous attention to infection control and hand hygiene is a vital part of this. I encourage all patients to feel empowered to ask everyone involved in their care whether they’ve cleaned their hands. Hand hygiene is one of the most important measures in the fight against health care-acquired infections, making it a key patient safety issue within our health system. International evidence is clear that improved hand hygiene practices help reduce health care-acquired infections, including antibiotic-resistant infections within hospitals. What are you doing to improve patient safety? The majority of you are observing the “5 moments”. However, we all need to make this “just the way we do things around here” – not something that we choose not to do! Everyone is accountable to ensure optimum patient safety. Hand hygiene is an important part of this. Patient Safety should be the first agenda item at every clinical team meeting. Hand gel (or alcohol based hand rub – to be precise) should be on the end of every patient’s bed or in the bed space. Given the known effectiveness of good hand hygiene on patient care and outcomes it is hard to think of a good reason why the compliance rate (with the “5 moments”) should not be set at 100%. The target is currently 70% rising to 80% next March. Our latest compliance rate of 62% highlights that good effective hand hygiene is not YET part of our culture. We owe it to our patients and those that entrust their care to us that we are doing everything to keep them safe and enable the best possible recovery. I am looking forward to seeing a significant improvement in our performance in the next report. 5 moments Expect to see and hear more about Hand Hygiene over the comThe Five Moments are those key ing weeks and months. A group of CDHB staff recently visited times when staff can dramatically Waikato DHB who have seen significant improvement in their hand reduce the risk of spreading inhygiene performance over the past year. They achieved this while fection, simply by washing hands major construction was going on around them. There are no excuses thoroughly or applying alcoholfor not doing the right thing. We will be looking to adopt some of their based hand rub: initiatives to help improve our hand hygiene practices. Moment 1 - before patient contact Moment 2 - before procedure See over the page for the “5 moments” poster – perhaps you could Moment 3 - after procedure or body print it and display it in your work area as a reminder. fluid exposure risk Moment 4 - after patient contact Have a great week Moment 5 - after contact with David patient surroundings.
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