JANE KIRK provides an insight into hand hygiene compliance monitoring – examining the technologies and approaches available to drive improvement in healthcare settings.
As far back as Semmelweis’s hand hygiene interventions,1 the importance of hand hygiene in healthcare settings has been clearly established. Several studies have demonstrated the association of reduced healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) when hand hygiene compliance rates were increased.2-4 For nearly a decade, hospitals have been measuring hand hygiene compliance among healthcare workers. In spite of the time and resources required to measure hand hygiene compliance using the direct observation method, hand hygiene compliance remains unsatisfactory with national averages below 50%.5 This article will review some of the different types of electronic hand hygiene compliance monitoring systems available today, the different technologies available, pros and cons, and some suggestions when shopping for a system for a healthcare facility.
For the purposes of this article, compliance can be defined as leveraging technology, products and clinical interventions to drive sustained improvements in hand hygiene compliance, thereby reducing the incidence of HCAIs, reducing the cost of healthcare, and improving patient outcomes. These three features – technology, products and clinical interventions – work synergistically to create a hand hygiene programme with the ultimate goal of sustained improvement in hand hygiene. A healthcare facility could purchase the most technologically advanced hand hygiene system, but if the hand hygiene products are not accepted by the staff, and there are no interventions to address trends found in the data, the goals will not be achieved.
The ‘gold standard’
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