Nurses lead the way in hand hygiene

As a push for a national hand hygiene initiative gets underway research has shown nurses outshine doctors and other medical staff by having the cleanest hands in the hospital. The National Hand Hygiene Initiative will be based on the Clean Hands Save Lives campaign conducted throughout 208 public hospitals in NSW from 2006-8. A study exploring the impact of the campaign found that the rate of hand hygiene compliance improved from 47% before the intervention to 61% towards the end of the program. Another study showed this improved compliance led to a 25% fall in MRSA non-ICU sterile site infections. The researchers also found that despite averaging three times as many patient contacts as other medical staff, nurses had a higher rate of compliance than any other group. The National Hand Hygiene Initiative, launched by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, aims to establish a standard system for measuring the rates of hospital acquired infections. “The [Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia] reporting system established by [Hand Hygiene Australia] is internationally unique and will potentially provide a useful template upon which any future expanded national system of nosocomial disease measurement could be based,” the authors wrote. About 60% of hospital-acquired Staphylococcus aureus infections are likely caused by poor hand hygiene, they said....