Patient hand washing 101..PODay 144

So, after tattling on hospital staff who don't wash their hands as often as they should, here comes a study by a Canadian group published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology that looks at patients who are in the hospital. The team tracked 279 adults who were patients in an organ transplant ward.  They found only about 30% washed their hands during bathroom visits, 40% at mealtime, 3% while using patient kitchen facilities, 3% on entering their hospital rooms but amazingly, 7% washed their hands when exiting their rooms.

Women were more likely to wash their hands and more likely to use soap than men. For some strange reason all patients were more likely to wash their hands later in the day than in the morning.

It looks like we patients are doing a much poorer job than the hospital staff. But we are the ones paying the price. The U.S. CDC ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)  reports that one in twenty-five hospital patients will contract at least one hospital related infection and in 2011 there were 722,000 cases of hospital acquired infection, some serious or life threatening.

Hand washing is very effective in preventing transfer of infections and it is a simple, inexpensive thing to do. We all know we should do it, are we just lazy? Are we rebelling against our mother's voice in our head? Are we in too big a hurry? Whatever the psychological explanation, the physical effects of not washing hands is real and risky. Not only do we need to nag the hospital staff, our guests and even our doctors, we need to look at ourselves as a source of contamination and change our habits! Since infection is a lifelong risk to the total shoulder replacement surgery patient, we need to be especially attentive to the little things like unwashed hands that put us at risk as well as the big things like a purulent wound on a cut foot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoHssZ_jBTc&sns=em