Practice ForumHand hygiene rates unaffected by installation of dispensers of a rapidly acting hand antiseptic*
Section snippets
Methods
The University of Virginia Health System has a 600-bed teaching hospital with 31 nursing units, including 9 intensive care units. The hospital provides both primary and tertiary care, admitting about 28,000 patients each year.
Six commercially available alcohol hand antiseptics containing emollients were evaluated during a 2-week period by a group of 15 health care workers who had been working in the hospital for a median of 15 years. The product selected by most of the workers as most pleasing
Results
The baseline handwashing compliance rate was 60% (76/126 opportunities). Physicians were found to be most compliant with a rate of 83%, followed by nurses (60%), technologists (56%), and housekeeping employees (36%) (Table 1).Workers MICU (%) 3 West (%) Total (%) Physicians 11/13 (85) 4/5 (80) 15/18 (83) Nurses 28/42 (66.7) 11/23 (47.8) 39/65 (60) Technicians 13/17 (76) 5/15 (33.3) 18/32 (56) Housekeepers 0/2 (0) 4/9 (52) 4/11 (36) Total
Discussion
The rate of nosocomial infections has increased in the 1990s,15, 16 and a higher proportion of infections are a result of multiply antibiotic-resistant microorganisms,17 which spread from patient to patient on the unwashed hands and equipment of health care workers. Hand hygiene has been shown to remove such pathogens from clinicians' hands13, 18 and to decrease both spread of nosocomial pathogens19 and nosocomial infection rates.20, 21, 22 Unfortunately, most studies have shown poor compliance
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Reprint requests: Barry M. Farr, MD, MSc, Box 473, University of Virginia Health System, Charlottesville, VA 22908.