Establish interdisciplinary team of hand hygiene audits help to improve hand hygiene

Applying Psychological Principles to Improve Hand Hygiene

Hand hygiene occurs at the intersection of habit and culture. Psychological and social principles, including operant conditioning and peer pressure of conforming social norms, facilitate behavior change. Participatory leadership and level hierarchies are needed for sustainable patient safety culture. Application of these principles progressively and significantly improved hand hygiene compared ...

Caregivers' perceptions of patients as reminders to improve hand hygiene.

Success of a multimodal program to improve hand hygiene compliance.

The purpose of this article was to describe the successful implementation of a quality improvement initiative focusing on a hand hygiene program that used the multimodal interventions of tailored education, monthly feedback, and reminders. Compliance rates improved from July 2011 to December 2012 by 57.4%. Efforts are continuing to ensure program sustainability.

Hand hygiene and anesthesiology.

Even though hand hygiene in hospitals is currently considered as the standard of clinical care, the history behind this practice is relatively recent. The practice of hand hygiene among health care workers was first proposed by Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-1865). He was an assistant professor of Medicine, at a time when puerperal fever was a common cause of maternal mortality. While working a...

Reconsidering hand hygiene monitoring.

Hand hygiene (HH) is a fundamental component of any successful infection prevention and control program. Healthcare professionals and the public now accept the performance of HH before and after patient contact as an essential and expected behavior. Despite this broad acceptance of the importance of performing HH, compliance rates among healthcare professionals remain unacceptably low [1, 2]. S...