Authors (including presenting author) :
Ng CM (1) Chan KW (1)
Affiliation :
(1) Physiotherapist, Physiotherapy Department, Tai Po Hospital
Introduction :
It is well known that five moments for hand hygiene are essential to prevent the spread of infectious disease in hospital. However, the previous hand hygiene audits found that the lowest compliance rate (< 40%) is the moment of “before touching patients”. Therefore reinforcement in this area should be needed.
Objectives :
1.To find out the reasons for not washing hands before touching patients.
2.To enhance the compliance rate in before touching patients.
Methodology :
A questionnaire is designed to find out the reasons why the colleagues has low compliance rate in washing hands before touching patients. It is consisted of six questions:
1. Do you think hand hygiene is important to prevent the spread of infectious disease?
2. Do you think there are sufficient washing facility or hand rub in department?
3. Do you always forget to perform hand hygiene because of heavy workload?
4. Is it difficult to change your habit in hand hygiene?
5. If you have ever forgotten to perform hand hygiene in the past, which reasons to make it happen?
6. Do you have any suggestion to improve your frequency in hand hygiene?
Then, an education talk is performed to arouse the importance of hand hygiene and the consequence of failure in performing it.
In addition, a printed calendar is stuck on the colleague’s personal file. Colleague has to put a sticker to the calendar every day to indicate that they have washed their hands before touching patients. It is proposed that by putting the sticker, colleague is reminded to wash their hands every time before seeing a patient. The trial has performed a month. An assigned staff will check the sticker before the end of the working day.
Result & Outcome :
The questionnaire reflects that the colleagues understand the importance in hand hygiene but always low compliance rate in washing hands before touching patients because of forgetfulness and heavy workload. After a month of trial, it is found that most colleagues have put the sticker each day on the calendar, which shows compliance with the hand washing policy. The compliance rate is as high as 95%.
