WEB CAM USED TO MONITOR HAND HYGIENE

[okarol]

WEB CAM USED TO MONITOR HAND HYGIENE
9 hours ago
Posted in News, Infection Control, Hand Hygeine, Clinical & Pharma, Practice Management, Technology Print

GENEVA, Switzerland—Hand hygiene in dialysis care is an extremely important part of quality care; however, the busy pace of a clinic creates the possibility that renal professionally may not adhere to the proper guidelines as much as they should.

It’s an issue that’s not exclusive to dialysis, nor is it something that something happening only in the United States. In fact, to get a better understanding of what exactly goes on in patient interaction, Japanese researchers set up a web camera in an intensive care unit in September 2010 to observe just what was going on, according to research presented at the International Conference on Prevention & Infection Control (ICPIC), which was held June 29 to July 2 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Click HERE for the research, which was also presented in BMC Proceedings.

Video from the camera was relayed through the hospital’s intranet to the infection control department and saved for later observation. Starting in December 2010, personnel on day and night shifts were assessed for a total of 100 hours using the observation form of the WHO Patient Safety team.

Conventional observation by ward nurses indicated that compliance with hand hygiene before touching a patient was 77 percent. However, observed adherence to hand hygiene was 22.5 percent. Direct observation with the web camera indicated that hand hygiene was required 11.6 times/hour for each patient.

Compliance with hand hygiene was 25.3 percent before touching a patient, 25.2 percent before a clean/aseptic procedure, 14 percent after body fluid exposure risk, 30.6 percent after touching a patient, and 11.5 percent after touching patient surroundings.

After improved education of and practices by healthcare practitioners, staff were again observed for 100 hours. Adherence to hand hygiene was found to have improved to 33.8 percent.

The researchers concluded that direct observation with a web camera allowed video to be recorded and saved for long periods and it allowed practices to be assessed. The saved video was circulated among the healthcare practitioners to allow a more objective intervention, according to the researcher.

http://www.renalbusiness.com/news/2011/08/web-cam-used-to-monitor-hang-hygiene.aspx