Effect of Environmental Cleanliness Intervention on Hospital Room Surface Cleanliness and Hospital-Acquired Infection Rates

The impact of environmental cleanliness on infection rates.

Much has been said in recent years about the lack of environmental cleanliness in hospitals. The House of Lords Select Committee (1998) talked about falling standards in hospital cleaning and, more recently, the government acknowledged in The NHS Plan (Department of Health, 2000) that hospitals were unacceptably dirty. Such comments may affect people's perceptions of hospitals and, rather than ...

Environmental hygiene in the operating room: cleanliness, godliness, and reality.

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely (P.J. O’Rourke). “Environment” is defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary as “the surroundings or conditions in which a person lives or operates,” whereas hygiene is defined as “conditions or practices conducive to maintaining health and preventing disease, especially through cleanliness.” Cleanliness is the state of being free...

Monitoring environmental cleanliness on two surgical wards.

Ten hand-touch sites were screened weekly on two surgical wards over two consecutive six-month periods. The results were analysed using hygiene standards, which specify (i) an aerobic colony count (ACC) > 2.5 cfu/cm(2), and (ii) presence of coagulase-positive staphylococci, as hygiene failures. Sites most often failing the standards were beds and hoist (64%: 33 of 52 weeks), bedside lockers (62...

Does cleanliness influence moral judgments? Response effort moderates the effect of cleanliness priming on moral judgments

Whether cleanliness influences moral judgments has recently become a topic of debate in the psychological literature. After the initial report that activating the notion of physical purity can result in less severe moral judgments (Schnall et al., 2008a), a direct replication (Johnson et al., 2014a) with much larger sample sizes failed to yield similar findings. The current paper examines the p...

Effect of Leadership Commitment and Education on Antimicrobial Use and Hospital-Acquired Clostridium difficile infection rates at a Community Hospital