BACKGROUND Alcohol sanitizers have not been demonstrated to reduce hospital-acquired infections over handwashing alone in controlled, well-designed clinical studies. A major reason for this may be the failure of traditional alcohol sanitizers to provide any residual, or persistent, activity. Any lapse in hand hygiene protocol then leaves patients and staff open to transmitting pathogens. The pu...

Patients and methods The outbreak occurred on a closed unit of the Psychiatry Department with 26 beds in 22 rooms. At the moment of the alert, 22 beds were occupied. The management of the outbreak consisted of reinforcement of hygiene measures and workshops on hand hygiene for the ward staff. The emergence of new cases in patients as well as in staff members lead to the restriction of new admis...

Improvement of compliance in hand hygiene is probably the most effective step in reducing the incidence of nosocomial infections (NI). But improvement of compliance is known to be complex. Six possibilities for improving compliance are available although some of them may be difficult to carry out. Rule 1: Select an alcohol-based hand rub which has a good skin tolerance and is acceptable to heal...

A fundamental goal of applied epidemiology is to determine whether a relationship between 2 factors is causal. For example, the primary purpose of an outbreak investigation is to identify what factor(s) “caused” the problem, and the purpose of the Study of the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control (SENIC Project) was to measure the effect of infection control and prevention programs on rates...

Hospitals all over Canada are realizing that Clostridium difficile can kill. The Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, Ontario, declared a C. difficile outbreak on February 23, 2007, after 39 new cases of C. difficile–associated disease (CDAD) were identified since the start of the year. Before this period, the baseline monthly incidence of hospital-acquired CDAD at this institution had been about...

Last year marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Ignaz Semmelweis’ landmark monograph on hand hygiene – at the time hand disinfection with chlorinated lime solution – as a means to prevent nosocomial infections [1]. All the necessary scientific evidence that improved hand hygiene practices in healthcare indeed reduce healthcare-associated infections and patient-to-patient transmissi...

From the data he had collected, Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis drew the right conclusions and began using disinfectants for handwashing. And this at a time when it was not at all known that infections were caused by bacteria. While ridiculed by colleagues, the results achieved impressively attested to just how correct were his views: there was a demonstrable reduction in mortality rates among puerper...

BACKGROUND Hand hygiene (HH) is the main tool for cross-infection prevention, but adherence to guidelines is low in limited-resource countries, and there are not available published data from Brazil. METHODS This is an observational, prospective, interventional, before-and-after study conducted in 4 intensive care units in 4 hospitals, which are members of the International Nosocomial Infecti...

OBJECTIVE Hand hygiene (HH) is a critical component for controlling hospital-acquired infection (HAI). The present study was designed to develop an intervention approach to improve compliance with HH among healthcare workers in a hospital setting. METHODS The HH intervention study was conducted in Guizhou Provincial People's Hospital, Guiyang, China and organized by its Department of HAI Mana...

BACKGROUND Evaluation and feedback of hand hygiene (HH) compliance are important elements of the WHO multimodal strategy for hospital infection control. Overt observation is recommended, but it may be confounded by Hawthorne effect. Covert observation offers the opportunity to decrease observer bias. In this study we conducted a one year hospital-wide HH promotion program that included medical ...