Hand-washing rates among Alberta health-care workers nears 80%

Nurses and doctors are cleaning their hands much more often than in the past, but Alberta Health Services says there's still work to do in making hand hygiene a habit among health-care staff.

Compliance rates edged up to 78.5 per cent in the latest quarterly report from AHS, nearing the target level of 80 per cent.

That's a major improvement from the rate of 49.7 per cent recorded in 2011/12.

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"Over the last several years, we've been trying very hard to get the message out to health-care workers so that they understand the importance of hand hygiene and so that they understand what our expectations are," saidDr. Mark Joffe, senior medical director for infection prevention andcontrol for AHS.

"Hand hygiene is probably the single most important measure for preventing the transmission of microbes in health care."

Compliance monitoring

The latest compliance rate isbased on 98,267 observations fromabout 200 hygienemonitors who carry around iPads and record whether health-care workers are properly sanitizing their hands during the four moments of patient care when they are supposed to.

The two most common moments are before entering a room for patient contact and then upon exiting the room, which can add up to a lot of hand washing.

"A typical, busy, front-line nurse would likely clean his or her hands certainly 50 to 100 times a day, possibly more," Joffe said.

The proliferation of alcohol-based, hand-sanitizing stations has made compliance easier, he noted.

More monitoring

In addition to increased training and education for health-care workers, he added,AHS has stepped up compliance monitoring, with nearly as many observations recordedin the past quarter as there were in all of last year.

The monitoring staff stand quietly with their iPads, Joffe said,neither hiding nor announcing their presence.

"It's like photo radar," he said. "You may know they're there but people tend to ignore them after a little while."

AHS has begun reporting the hand-hygiene results quarterly, rather than annually, as well.

Best and worst

Among major facilities, theQueen Elizabeth II Hospital in Grande Prairie had the highest compliance ratein the latest report, at 96.9 per cent.

Calgary's South Health Campus, meanwhile, had the lowest rate, coming inat 65.5 per cent.

"Hand hygiene performance is a challenge for all health care organizations," the report notes.

"We must continue to improve our health care worker hand hygiene compliance and are working hard to achieve our targets."