Doctors with dirty hands a real problem
To comply with the health code, restaurant workers must wash their hands before working with food. Yet, hospital workers are notorious for not washing up before they work on patients!
According to recent research, hospital health care workers complied with handwashing rules less than half (48%) of the time. The other half, they interacted with patients without washing first.
"Noncompliance with handwashing is a substantial problem," researchers from the University of Geneva, Switzerland said. To reach that conclusion, a team of infection-control nurses observed health care workers at a Geneva hospital for one month.
Although it seems like a minor matter, cleanliness can be a life and death issue in a hospital. More than 80,000 deaths each year are linked to infections patients contracted while in the hospital.
These deadly infections are often passed to the patient through contact with doctors, nurses and other hospital workers. That's why most hospitals have strict rules about washing hands with antiseptic soaps -- a procedure which can greatly reduce infection risks.
But, in more than half the cases, the rules aren't being followed.
The study found that the prime offenders were the doctors themselves, who were nearly three times more likely to skip handwashing than nurses.
The most shocking finding was that the compliance rate was lowest for those situations in which clean hands were most important. A particularly vulnerable situation is when health care workers have to move their hands from a part of the body known to be contaminated with bacteria to a relatively "clean" one, free of bacteria. Yet, during this high-risk activity, health care workers washed their hands just 11% of the time.
Even in those areas of the hospital where patients' lives and health would be most threatened by the possibility of infection, dirty hands prevailed. In intensive care wards, for instance, the compliance rate was a dismal 36%.
The researchers warned that "the real situation may be even worse than reported," since workers at the Geneva hospital being studied were informed of the investigation ahead of time and knew they were being watched.
SOURCE: Annals of Internal Medicine, Jan. 19, 1999.
http://www.wcanews.com/archives/1999/Mar/mar99f.htm
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, BABY, now THAT is what I am talking about!
