MRSA

Hand Hygene Campaign at Alder Hey

Alder Hey gets to Grips with Grubby Mits

The Royal Liverpool Children’s NHS Trust has been chosen to become a partner with the National Patient Safety Agency’s (NPSA) national Clean Your Hands campaign which is going live this month.

Our Infection Control Team is strongly supporting this campaign in a number of ways. A series of demonstrations will take place in the Hospital Restaurant week commencing 17 January 2005, promoting good hand hygiene practices to patients, families and carers and staff, with the aid of the ‘bug busting’ unit. This magical machine works by showing up the areas routinely missed when washing hands simply by placing them inside!

Patients are also getting involved by taking part in a competition to design a poster showing how important it is to wash your hands properly. Patients and visitors will be encouraged to ask staff to “wash their hands” prior to them treating their child. We will also be handing out lots of badges, stickers and posters encouraging hand hygiene, some featuring our own staff Hand Hygiene Champions. These are members of staff, based in the trust, who have been identified by patients, visitors and other staff to always demonstrate good hand hygiene. Each area has a nominated member of staff who will help the Infection Control Team to co-ordinate the campaign.

The Trust is committed to improving patient safety and is committed to improving hand hygiene for staff, patients and visitors. Hands are an ideal repository for microbes which can cause infections. This can be greatly reduced by good hand hygiene and we all know that prevention is always better than a cure.

Sharon Lowe, Consultant Nurse in Infection Control said:

“Healthcare associated infection can be reduced by 9% when healthcare staff regularly clean their hands and research has shown that it is very effective to use an alcohol hand rub which will reduce the number of bacteria on the hands, by 99% in 30 seconds”.

All our staff working in the clinical areas will carry individual bottles of alcohol hand gel called tottles. This means that no matter where they are working they will always have access to hand hygiene facilities. We have also placed alcohol hand gel by every hand wash basin and at other convenient and safe areas within the wards.

There have been many technological advances in clinical care over the last century, one of the most fundamental and enduring features of good practice is hand hygiene. It is a basic measure to get right but as the NPSA’s Clean Your Hands campaign indicates, it is an area requiring constant vigilance.

Remember “CLEAN HANDS SAVE LIVES"