Hand hygiene: thinking outside the box

Around the country, infection prevention and control teams are coming up with innovative ideas to promote the message of hand hygiene and its importance in reducing healthcare-associated infections. Creative, fun and attention-grabbing approaches are being adopted to raise the profile of hand hygiene in memorable ways that will inspire, engage and even entertain hospital staff, visitors and patients. From novelty costumes to hologram nurses, the aim is to ensure that people ‘sit up and take notice’ and do not tire of the repeated message to clean their hands. Increasingly, teams are also going the extra mile by taking their message outside of the acute setting into the community – working closely with community health partners, care homes and children’s groups (such as the Brownies and Scouts), as well as local schools, with the aim of driving improved hand hygiene. At the recent Infection Prevention conference in London, some of these prevention and control at the Royal College of Nursing. Each year, the Schülke Hand Hygiene Champion award is presented to people who have made a real difference – through the roll-out of innovation, creative ideas to raise awareness, the introduction of measurement tools and novel training ideas. At the latest Infection Prevention conference, Suzanne Rapley and the East Surrey hospital infection prevention and control team, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust (SASH), were announced as the winners of the 2013 award. Helen Levers of the Rotherham Foundation Trust (Community Division) and Darren Wheldon of University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust were the two runners up. Entries were scored against a set of key parameters including innovation, engagement, use of a multi modal approach and ‘going the extra mile’. Suzanne Rapley and her team were described as ‘the clear winners’.

Attention grabbing

Suzanne Rapley has championed hand hygiene in the Trust since the early National Patient Safety Agency Clean your hands campaign and was instrumental in developing aspects of the NPSA campaign. In addition to the tasks expected of an infection prevention nurse (such as audit, education, information and promotion of hand hygiene), Suzanne is described as having “a remarkable ability to think outside the box”, ensuring that hand hygiene remains a priority and is constantly seen in fresh, eye-catching ways. Suzanne persuaded the Trust to support the use of a latex hand costume suit which she has worn on many occasions to promote the hand hygiene message. (The costume was eventually purchased for the Trust by a local company). The appropriate use of humour can be an effective educational device, which is often overlooked within the NHS. Suzanne and her team use humour to engage with staff, patients and visitors, while delivering important hand hygiene messages. The hand costume has been nicknamed ‘SASHA’ after the name of the Trust (Surrey and Sussex Healthcare) and now makes regular appearances during Global Hand Hygiene days and Infection Prevention Week. “It is important to come up with different ways to get the message across,” commented Suzanne Rapley. “I like to use fun and humour as the message tends to ‘stick’. We used the hand costume to grab people’s attention. “We stood by the main entrance to greet people arriving at the hospital. Often people coming to the hospital face a worrying experience in terms of unpleasant treatment or because they are visiting sick relatives, but the costume makes people of all ages smile and proved to be a welcome, light-hearted distraction, while delivering a serious message.” When introducing fun approaches to getting the message across, Suzanne stresses the importance of being persistent: “Ideas such as SASHA may be met with resistance at first, as it is not very ‘corporate’, but we have shown that this method is memorable. It is a talking point – staff still stop me in the corridors and ask when we are getting SASHA out again. People remember SASHA, rather than published hand hygiene data placed on a ward wall.” Suzanne explained that the hand hygiene message is further promoted with a series of high profile ‘klings’ – these are posters that are electro-statically attached to windows in the main hospital streets which carry messages such as: Clean Hands are Safe Hands and Stop, Clean Your Hands. Because they are easily removed, the klings can be re-sited around the hospital so that the messages always feel fresh and are eye-catching, rather than just fading into the hospital background. She also regularly contributes infection control and hand hygiene articles to the SaSH window – an internal newsletter for Trust staff. In keeping with her aims to make hand hygiene messages relevant and fun, she recently organised a Handy Competition showing famous hand statues as a quiz for staff in the newsletter.