There are few more important hygiene related topics than focussing on the importance of hand hygiene compliance levels among staff and indeed visitors in the hospital environment. Staff who are likely to be using the sluice room are particularly key in avoiding the spread of infection in hospital and care home settings as they are likely to be using the hospital macerator and other hospital sluice room equipment, handling dirty bed pans and other soiled items.
In hospitals and care environments good hand hygiene can prevent cross contamination, however recent research has demonstrated that compliance with the recommendations is often poor among healthcare workers. It is also true that many interventions have been and gone and it’s always the same: an initial improvement, which fails to be sustained in the long term. The biggest issue reported is usually a lack of easy access to hand hygiene when time constraints are considered, so hands free anti-bacterial gel units in enough areas is absolutely vital. This usually leads to far better compliance across the board – also with visitors.
Alongside this, education and appropriate literature replicated across every part of the hospital is vital to ensure that the message continues to get across.
Alongside the repeated messages of the importance of hand hygiene, it is important despite increasingly stressed services that members of staff who may be contagious do not come into work as the act of ‘soldiering on’ can in fact be of serious detriment to the hygiene of the unit.
In case anyone is not sure, there are 5 recognized moments of hand hygiene, which are as follows:
- Before touching a patient,
- Before clean/aseptic procedures,
- After body fluid exposure/risk,
- After touching a patient, and.
- After touching patient surroundings.
This message needs to be understood by every member of staff working in the hospital or institution, not just the sluice room.