Moments for Hand Hygiene (Nursing)

00:04 Hi, guys, welcome to hand hygiene.

00:07 So this topic you may think, "Okay, I know plenty about hand hygiene", right.

00:11 But let's take a few minutes to talk about it.

00:13 You know, you see posters everywhere, campaigns out there, you hear lots of talk about lots of hand hygiene.

00:20 But it's really important for us as healthcare providers to take this small step in keeping our patients safe.

00:29 Now, according to the CDC, or Center for Disease Control, you may hear of them a lot.

00:34 On average health care providers, they'll only clean their hands about half the time they should.

00:40 Okay, so if you really think about this, if we're in an acute care or hospital, for example, or taking care of sick patients, think about all the things that we can touch, and we're not cleaning our hands the whole time.

00:53 That could be blood, body fluid, feces that could be surfaces.

00:58 There's lots of things that we come in contact with, and then we go see other patients, so this is a real problem.

01:05 Now, about any given day, when we're in the hospital, 1 in 31 hospital patients has at least 1 healthcare associated infection.

01:14 Let's take a minute here.

01:16 What that means is if a patient's in the hospital, there's a good chance they could get an infection because we nursing or health care providers gave it to them.

01:27 How do we prevent that? Well, we wash our hands.

01:31 Now, when we talk about hand hygiene, when do we need to do it? There's lots of times and lots of points.

01:37 So let's talk about those.

01:38 So really just before entering or exiting the room.

01:42 So just think about, "Hey, if I go into a room or out, wash your hands." Before any procedure is really important, and definitely after body fluid exposure.

01:52 And lastly, before or after touching a patient.

01:56 You may think, "Okay, why do I've got to do it before?" Well, if you think about it, again, as healthcare providers, we may see multiple patients a day.

02:05 So it's really important that we clean our hands right before we come in contact with another patient.