The 'clean-your-hands' campaign has now been introduced into hospitals in England but it was initially piloted in six acute trusts. The campaign was multi-modal and aimed to improve hand hygiene compliance. This review reports the findings from one of the trusts involved in the pilot. The campaign consisted of a toolkit that included placing alcohol hand rub beside patients, along with posters ...

Objective To evaluate the impact of the Cleanyourhands campaign on rates of hospital procurement of alcohol hand rub and soap, report trends in selected healthcare associated infections, and investigate the association between infections and procurement. Design Prospective, ecological, interrupted time series study from 1 July 2004 to 30 June 2008. Setting 187 acute trusts in England and Wales....

Hand hygiene is one of the most important measures to prevent the transmission of infections. The infection prevention and control team at Trillium Health Centre has developed an interactive visual portrayal of the efficacy of alcohol-based hand rub use. Staff participate by having fingertip bacteria colony counts determined prior to and after hand sanitizing. During the process, infection cont...

BACKGROUND Many approaches have been taken to increase compliance with hand hygiene by health care professionals. We evaluated a nurse call system used as a tool in a positive deviance (PD) approach to improving compliance. METHODS We conducted a quasi-experimental study between September 2008 and December 2010 in 2 step-down units (SDUs). The consumption of alcohol-based sanitizers for hand ...

Irritant contact dermatitis is often found on the hands of healthcare workers and is generally caused by frequent hand washing, gloves, aggressive disinfectants or detergents. Alcohols have only a marginal irritation potential, although they may cause a burning sensation on pre-irritated skin. A burning sensation when using alcohols therefore, suggests that the skin barrier is already damaged. ...

BACKGROUND A procedure for including activity against enveloped viruses in the post-contamination treatment of hands has been recommended, but so far no European standard is available to implement it. In 2004, the German Robert Koch-Institute (RKI) and the German Association for the Control of Virus Disease (DVV) suggested that vaccinia virus and bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) should be use...

Recently, much attention has been focused on hand hygiene in health care with the publication of a new national guideline. In the guideline, washing hands with soap and water is replaced by rubbing hands with an alcohol hand rub as the primary means of hand hygiene to be used by healthcare personnel involved in routine patient care. The rationale behind this shift is the documented increased an...

Hand hygiene is one of the most important measures to prevent transmission of infectious agents and plays a major role in prevention of infection in any type of healthcare setting. While requirements for the efficacy of hand disinfectants are defined in European testing norms such as the EN 1500 for hygienic hand disinfection or EN 12791 for surgical hand preparation, no specific recommendation...

Health care-associated infections constitute one of the greatest challenges of modern medicine. Despite compelling evidence that proper hand washing can reduce the transmission of pathogens to patients and the spread of antimicrobial resistance, the adherence of health care workers to recommended hand-hygiene practices has remained unacceptably low. One of the key elements in improving hand-hyg...

BACKGROUND Several studies have shown that rubbing hands with an alcohol/chlorhexidine solution provides equivalent microbial decontamination to a conventional surgical scrub using aqueous chlorhexidine. However, the authors believe that these studies have methodological flaws that limit their applicability to the operating theatre environment. As such, a method was developed to compare product...