Identifying gaps in hand hygiene performance

Healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) continue to be a grave cause for concern. Mike Sullivan, managing director of GOJO Industries Europe explains how technological advances could make the monitoring of performance more accurate and help to identify gaps in provision before it is too late.

In many walks of life, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and perhaps the same can be said for hand hygiene in healthcare settings. I allude to one of the great pioneers, Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis, sometimes referred to as ‘the saviour of mothers’. Born in 1818 he became a physician whose experience in the hospital obstetric units of the mid-19th century led him to believe that by improving hand washing practices patient mortality, which was then running at around 10%-35%, could be reduced significantly. However, his ideas clashed with the medical establishment of the time and a lack of scientific evidence hampered his cause. Now we know how right he was, and I cannot help thinking that, if he were alive today, he would have been very interested in using the latest technological tools to evaluate his work and prove his theories.

Hospitals have been measuring the effectiveness of infection control processes in accordance with hand hygiene guidelines for many years now. Public Health England (PHE) works with the NHS to implement routine surveillance programmes, as well as advising on how to prevent and control infections in establishments such as care homes, hospitals and schools. It acknowledges the importance of surveillance programmes in providing essential information about what and where the problems are and how well control measures are working.