Hand Hygiene: The Foundation for Infection Prevention (Podcast)

Washing your hands sounds so simple. However, the hands remain the most common source of transmission in healthcare.

“The foundation for infection prevention is your hand hygiene,” says Persis Sosiak, MPH, BSN, RN, Infection Prevention Manager for Cleveland Clinic's West Submarket. “Hand hygiene is an elementary concept with a critical impact if you don’t do it.”

In this episode of Cleveland Clinic’s Nurse Essentials podcast, Sosiak and Infection Preventionist Christine Rose, BSN, RN, discuss the importance of hand hygiene and how to improve compliance. They talk about:

• The World Health Organization’s “Five Moments of Hand Hygiene”
• When it’s ok to use alcohol-based cleaners versus soap and water
• Common hand hygiene mistakes and how to avoid them
• How nurse leaders can set up their teams for hand hygiene success
• The importance of cleaning technology tools you touch frequently, such as keyboards and mobile phones
• The role of hand hygiene audits and dashboards

Click the podcast player above to listen to the episode now, or read on for a short, edited excerpt. Check out more Nurse Essentials episodes at my.clevelandclinic.org/podcasts/nurse-essentials or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast excerpt

Sosiak: Our nursing leaders can be part of this. I think one opportunity is to model good behavior. And I think that that can be very meaningful and impactful to other caregivers.

I think another concept is really surrounding our culture of high reliability. That anyone in any role can politely and kindly say to anyone in any role, "Please wash your hands." At my facility, it's been very impressive to see that in practice.

When we are asked [to wash our hands] if we don't do it for whatever reason, the response should be, "thank you” and proceed to wash there. It's not an opportunity to argue or to push back or to degrade in any way. But I think that the high reliability concepts really have been powerful for things in infection prevention like hand hygiene, like PPE.

Rose: And another point along those lines, if a patient or a visitor asks a caregiver to clean their hands, you may have done it on the way in and their head was turned or something. Again, say, “Thank you for the reminder. I did clean my hands, but I'm going to do it again for you because I know this is important.”

When I worked in nursing education, I would say that cleaning your hands in front of a person that is a stranger to you and you're a stranger to them is a nonverbal indication of trust-building because patients and visitors know that it's expected that we're going to clean our hands. And when you come in cleaning your hands, you've already made a good impression to that patient because they can trust you for doing that. So, I think that it just really speaks volumes.