Hand Hygiene Safety

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Hand Hygiene Safety in Nursing Care According to a recent survey, there are around 2.5 million nosocomial infections that arise every year in the United States. A major reason for patients developing these hospital-acquired infections is the poor hand hygiene practiced by health care workers (Fox, 2015). Hand hygiene, or otherwise known as hand washing, is a very simple but important precaution that all healthcare workers need to be performing. Nurses especially, need to pay special attention to proper hand hygiene because they interact the most out of anyone when it comes to giving patient-centered care. If nurses were to continuously perform proper hand hygiene before, during, and after patient care, then the number of nosocomial infections …show more content…
According to Taber’s Dictionary, hand hygiene is the single most effective method for preventing nosocomial infections (Venes, 2009). Usually when a person hears hand hygiene they assume the person is talking about hand washing, but this can also include using alcohol-based hand scrubs such as different hand sanitizers. When using hand sanitizers, the substance needs to be completely rubbed into hands and dried to be effective. A person that is washing their hands with soap and water, needs to make sure that they are scrubbing the entire hand and between the fingers, for about thirty seconds then completely drying off their hands. Although hand washing is a very simple thing to perform, many workers forget about it. The rate of health care providers that comply with proper hand hygiene techniques is only around 50% (Waltman, 2011). The lack of using good hand hygiene is causing deaths of around 90,000 patients across the United States (Fox, …show more content…
The rate of nosocomial infections related back to people washing their hands is way too high. Studies have been done that show that at least a third of infections acquired in hospitals are related to the lacking hand washing system (Pittet, 2001). It would be beneficial for hospitals to have quarterly educational conferences of how important hand hygiene actually is. If more workers realized the significance this little piece of work had on the patients, then they may be more prone to changing the system and paying more attention to the
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