Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
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H Y G I E N E Have staff members take a pre-test to compliance skin irritation than a traditional soap-and- rate. Hold meet- water hand wash are draws, plus you don't Be patient ings to share need to be at a scrub sink to use them. Understand that quality the practice improvement studies take time, improvements thought. assess their hand hygiene competency. Assign a staff member to play the part of "secret shopper" — the person who will conduct surveillance on the hand hygiene 3 Marysville Ohio Surgery Center H A N D Unexpected benefit habits of all personnel in the facility, and effort. Christy was our hand hygiene you seek, and including physicians. secret shopper, and surveillance some- re-educate staff times presented a challenge for 2 reasons. on the impor- staff and providing them with collective First, gathering data was a big chore. As a tance of proper hand hygiene. Create been anticipating (see "The Importance of education on the importance of hand staff nurse in a small ASC, going from pre- posters and visual reminders on the topic Discharge Details"). We can't say that we hygiene isn't in and of itself shocking. After op to the OR to PACU, she was wearing all and hang them in the break room and in expected clarified discharge instructions, all, there's no harm in periodic retraining. the hats and still had to find time to collect clinical areas to help keep the hand hygiene and not vigilant hand hygiene, to help But we were surprised, for instance, to and crunch the numbers. Second, secrecy basics at the fore of your staff's attention. lower our SSI rate. But we are proud to observe some staff members exiting one was important, and she didn't want our OR and entering another without washing small staff to know she was the one doing pensers are available in every patient care lance, we've also seen significant improve- their hands in between. When we followed the observations. When she was asked area — we found that convenient access ments in our staff's hand hygiene compli- up to ask them about it, a few of them about it, she told staffers that housekeep- to hand sanitizer really helped to increase ance, which surely has benefits of its own. admitted they hadn't even given it a ing was taking notes. (After which we hand hygiene compliance — and conduct OSM The idea of monitoring an experienced SANITIZED IN A SECOND Conveniently available alcoholbased hand rubs makes hand hygiene compliance easy. Make sure alcohol-based hand rub dis- expected to see staff saluting when always deliver the answers you may have report that during our continuing surveil- niques for using the waterless product as mop.) trials and science experiments, don't live demonstrations of the correct tech- someone came down the hall with a Quality improvement projects, like clinical well as for performing a traditional soap- Mr. Harris (tharris@moscllc.com) is the administrator and Ms. Schofield (cschofield@moscllc.com) is the quality improvement nurse at the Marysville Ohio Surgery Center. and-water scrub. After you've measured a 3 pensers with evidence-based studies baseline and are consistently emphasizing the effectiveness of alcohol- collecting data and observations, based cleansers in reducing bacteria and implement education and upgrades to viruses on the skin. That they require less effect a change in your hand hygiene time to use and are less likely to cause Initiate change PEEKED, INTEREST Ms. Schofield observes housekeeper Christine Albridge at the sink during Marysville Ohio's "secret shopper" monitoring program. 7 SUPPLEMENT TO O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E | M AY 2013 Back up the availability of hand-rub dis- M AY 2013 | S U P P L E M E N T TO O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E 8