Change Non-Compliance of Hand Hygiene in Healthcare

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Non-Compliance of Hand Hygiene in Healthcare Setting

Hand hygiene is once of the fundamental areas that are often ignored and not well covered in inspections or standardizations, yet it is on area that almost all patients can be affected by or infected through within the healthcare facilities. Though there are recommended hand hygiene practices within the healthcare institutions and in particular the sensitive sections or departments like the obstetrics section, there has been a lot of non-compliance, total negligence of these practices or in most cases use of the wrong detergents to clean hands hence passing infections to the patients.

According to CDC (2013), in their study conducted in General Hospital of Vienna, the rates of mortality among mothers who gave birth in the hospital went down when the staff in the hospital used antiseptic agents as compared to when they used plain soap. CDC also notes that in the recent studies, it was indicated that the healthcare-associated infections went significantly low when the antiseptic hand wash was used and the adherence to the hand hygiene practices was observed. The adherence rates are however very low within the healthcare facilities standing at only 40%, a fact that indicates that there is high predisposition of patients to possible infections within the facilities that should be giving them better health.

The gravity of the problem is such that there are no uniform data since there are some infections that patients get from doctors and are not documented due to lack of immediate detection or being mistaken as infection from other areas outside the healthcare facility. However, it is postulated that approximately 220,000 people get victims of the Healthcare associated infection (HCAI) within Canada alone, and out of these

8,000 to 12,000 of them are estimated to end up dying due to the infection (BC Patient Safety & Quality Council, 2013). This is a representative population in a first world country, meaning there are, possibly and highly likely so that these percentages of infections are much higher in other less developed countries.