Joint Commission Improvement Project Targets Hand Hygiene
The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare is working on its first improvement venture: The Hand Hygiene Project. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 2 million patients get a hospital-related infection every year and 90,000 die from their infection.
Causes of Failure to Clean Hands
- Ineffective placement of dispensers or sinks
- Hand hygiene compliance data are not collected or reported accurately or frequently
- Lack of accountability and just-in-time coaching
- Safety culture does not stress hand hygiene at all levels
- Ineffective or insufficient education
- Hands full
- Wearing gloves interferes with process
- Perception that hand hygiene is not needed if wearing gloves
- Healthcare workers forget
- Distractions
Early results of the program found on average that caregivers washed their hands less than 50 percent of the time. "Demanding that healthcare workers try harder is not the answer. These healthcare organizations have the courage to step forward to tackle the problem of hand washing by digging deep to find out where the breakdowns take place so we can create targeted solutions that will work now and keep working in the future," said Mark R. Chassin, M.D., M.P.P, M.P.H., president, The Joint Commission.
By January, 2010, the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare plans to have data to demonstrate whether the proposed hand hygiene solutions can be sustained to achieve a 90+ percent compliance rate.
Eight hospitals are participating in this project:
- Cedars-Sinai Health System, Los Angeles, California
- Exempla Lutheran Medical Center, Wheat Ridge, Colorado
- Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, Baltimore, Maryland
- Memorial Hermann Health Care System, Houston, Texas
- Trinity Health, Novi, Michigan
- Virtua, Marlton, New Jersey
- Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
To read the full release from the Joint Commission for Transforming Healthcare, click here.
Photo Credit: Mag3737