Healthcare facilities are faced with the difficult challenge of convincing patients that it’s safe to return to critical and elective care. Patients are seeking assurances that their healthcare provider has made their personal well-being a priority from the moment they enter the facility. Hand hygiene is a critical and foundational aspect of patient safety that spans across all hierarchies and disciplines.
What makes hand hygiene so challenging? First, it is a simple task performed in a complex environment. Second, the sheer volume of hand hygiene that is and should be performed by healthcare workers makes it difficult to manage and improve. Automated hand hygiene monitoring systems have shed new light on this.1 No other task comes close and involves so many healthcare workers.
With the pandemic came unprecedented challenges to healthcare facilities, and some quality metrics like hand hygiene performance were difficult or impossible to obtain. Published reports of hand hygiene performance during the pandemic showed that initial performance increased followed shortly thereafter by a return to baseline or below.1,2 Quality metrics like hand hygiene are essential during both times of stability and times of crisis.3
The goal of any quality metric is to obtain reliable data to improve patient safety, yet hospitals relying on direct observation alone are likely insufficiently allocating and deploying valuable resources for improvement efforts based on the scant information obtained. Quality and safety leaders readily acknowledge that a gap exists between reported compliance rates and hand hygiene behaviors taking place on a 24/7 basis.
The next step for many hospitals is to implement a more accurate, efficient, and reliable measurement system. Over the past decade, healthcare facilities have been introduced to automated hand hygiene monitoring systems that have been designed to provide standardized collection of data across multiple units and facilities on a 24/7 basis.4,5 PURELL SMARTLINK™ AMS was developed to serve as a metric for capturing hand hygiene data and managing risk associated with hand hygiene behaviors.
As SARS-CoV-2 becomes a less formidable disruptor and there is a renewed focus on quality in healthcare, implementing technology to efficiently generate large volumes of standardized hand hygiene data can provide a more complete picture of hand hygiene practices leading to better resource allocation and improved patient care.
1 Moore LM et al. The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on hand hygiene performance in hospitals. Am J Infect Control. 2021;49(1):30-33.
2 Makhni S et al. Hand hygiene compliance rate during the COVID-19 pandemic. JAMA Int Med. 2021;181(7):1006-1008.
3 Austin M & Kachalia A. The state of health care quality measurement in the era of COVID-19. JAMA. 2020;324(4):333-334.
4 Boyce JM. Measuring health care worker hand hygiene activity: current practices and emerging technologies. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2011;32:1016-28.
5 Boyce JM. Electronic monitoring in combination with direct observation as a means to significantly improve hand hygiene compliance. Am J Infect Control 2017;45:528-35.