One Unnecessary Death Is Too Many !
www.WASHYOURHANDS.ORG
THE 4TH LEADING CAUSE OF PREVENTABLE DEATHS in the United States is Hospital Acquired Infections. Every year over 100,000 deaths occur that could have been prevented if caregivers would only develop the discipline to wash their hands after each and every patient contact. If hospital and nursing home administrators put LIVES ahead of profits and mandated that caregivers MUST take the extra few seconds to implement safe hand hygiene practices or be held accountable, then the number of unnecessary deaths would be reduced dramatically and immediately.
A new mother sits by her tiny, premature baby in a neonatal intensive care unit. She watches as a physician touches the baby without first washing his hands or using the waterless, alcohol-based hand antiseptic just a couple of feet away. A few minutes later, a nurse and then another doctor also fail to perform these basic procedures. When her baby was admitted to the unit, the mother was told to remind caregivers to wash their hands, but only after witnessing repeated failures does she muster the courage to speak up about the practice she thought would be routine. By then, her baby has acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) — probably transported on the hands of a caregiver who had been examining other babies who are colonized with MRSA. A few days later, MRSA invades the baby's bloodstream; it eventually proves fatal. Such preventable infections, caused by the failure to practice hand hygiene, are far from rare, and they occur in many of the finest neonatal intensive care units in the United States.
MRSA and other health care–associated infections have been prime targets of hospital infection-control and patient-safety programs for years, yet the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria continues to increase, and the rate of infections caused by these pathogens remains unacceptable. What can be done about these seemingly intractable problems?
Patient-safety experts stress that complex, error-prone systems are at the root of most mistakes in health care. Archaic, poorly designed systems often undermine the best efforts of well-intentioned, highly motivated clinicians and health care personnel to provide safe care.
Infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as MRSA, which are difficult to treat, are transmitted primarily by the contaminated hands of health care providers who have touched a colonized patient or something in the patient's environment. Patients who are colonized or infected with resistant pathogens often have billions of colony-forming units of bacteria per milliliter of sputum or per gram of stool. Their skin and immediate environment may also be heavily contaminated. Caregivers who leave the bedsides of such patients without performing hand hygiene may carry thousands or even hundreds of thousands of colony-forming units of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on their hands. Fortunately, the remedy for this situation is simple. If every caregiver would reliably practice simple hand hygiene when leaving the bedside of every patient and before touching the next patient, there would be an immediate and profound reduction in the spread of resistant bacteria. The recent widespread deployment of waterless, alcohol-based hand antiseptics has made this task easier even for harried caregivers. Performing hand hygiene with these products kills bacteria (with the exception of Clostridium difficile) very rapidly, takes much less time than traditional hand washing, and is gentler on the hands than soap. Yet compliance with hand hygiene remains poor in most institutions — often in the range of 40 to 50 percent.
Another industry in which cleanliness is paramount — computer-chip manufacturing — may be able to teach us something about this issue.
In today's information age there is NO excuse that patients should not be made fully aware of the preventable risk that they encounter just by entering a hospital.
Email us at: Robin@washyourhands.org
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