Norfolk General Hospital takes your care and your safety very seriously, and we are committed to transparency. On an annual basis, beginning in March 2009, we will be reporting our hand hygiene compliance rates on our website.
In 2008, Norfolk General Hospital committed to participating in the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care " Just Clean Your Hands" program. This program contains five steps to improving healthcare workers knowledge of when to perform hand hygiene. In August 2008, NGH completed a baseline assessment of hand hygiene practices. This assessment was completed before any education on the "Just Clean Your Hands" program was provided, and designed to determine a starting point.
Since 2008 NGH has installed many alchol hand rub dispensers to ensure everyone can clean their hands when they need to. We have also given all our staff more education on hand hygiene. We completed a reaudit to see how we were doing. The graph below shows that we have improved!
Ontario hospitals are posting their hand hygiene compliance rates as percentages for time periods identified by the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, using the following formula:
Number of times hand hygiene performed X100
Number of observed hand hygiene indications
Two different indications for hand hygiene were measured:
1. Hand hygiene performed before initial patient/patient environment contact by all health care providers.
2. Hand hygiene performed after patient/patient environment contact by all health care providers.
The goal of public reporting hand hygiene compliance is to achieve an overall assessment of whether compliance rates are improving. It is normal for rates to vary from hospital to hospital.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it so hard for health care professionals to wash their hands?
To be clear, health care providers are washing their hands, and it is a practice that continues to improve as we learn more about hand hygiene best practices.
Is it true that hospital staff aren't washing their hands because they are too busy and over worked?
No, this is not the case. The MOHLTC's provincial hand hygiene campaign, Just Clean Your Hands, was designed in a way that helps hospitals and individuals overcome the barriers to proper hand hygiene and to improve compliance with hand hygiene best practices.
The Just Clean Your Hands program recognizes that health care providers are busy and require immediate access to hand hygiene products at the right time in the patient care process. The program supports having alchol-based hand rub at the point of care to address this barrier and to make it easier and faster for health care providers to clean their hands. This type of system support is critical to sustaining improved hand hygiene compliance.
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