Hand Hygiene Leads to More Preventive Efforts

• 10/16/2009
• Author: Steven Berman
• Category: The Journal Blog
• 20756 Views
• 0 Comments
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This week, Mark Bittle, lead author of "Engaging the Patient as Observer to Promote Hand Hygiene Compliance in Ambulatory Care,” which appeared in the October 2009 issue, guests on the blog .In the article, Dr. Bittle and Suzanne LaMarche describe how involving the patient is a simple and cost-effective way to monitor hand hygiene in the ambulatory setting. In this blog, Dr. Bittle reflects on how hand hygiene efforts at the Johns Hopkins Outpatient Center have now led to other preventive measures in the outpatient clinical practice setting. The Journal welcomes your comments about this blog and your own experiences in monitoring hand hygiene compliance, influenza vaccination, or other preventive efforts.
 
The hand hygiene compliance monitoring project has recently sparked interest among members of the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s ambulatory quality and patient safety task force in the need to implement other preventive measures in our specialty practices. Hand hygiene, after all, represents a prevention practice. For example, we have also begun an initiative whereby we have requested our specialty practices to screen all patients for influenza vaccination. Essentially, at each encounter, the practices ask patients if they have had a flu vaccination and, if not, would they want one. Prevention is one of the keys to reducing the burden of illness, and reducing the burden of illness is one of the fundamental factors to reducing increases in health care expenditures. Yet, this process of asking specialists to screen for a preventive measure has met with some considerable resistance. Much of this resistance reflects the perception that prevention is somehow the sole purview of primary care physicians and implementing this five-question screening process will negatively impact productivity. Given the importance of screening for hand washing and other essential prevention services, we hope to gain practices’ cooperation to build appropriate prevention screening into every clinical encounter, regardless of the provider’s specialty.
 
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