When Everyone's a Hand Hygiene Spy
Make surveillance everyone's job, and watch compliance rates soar.
W
hen you
work at
our hos-
pital, you often get
the feeling you're
being watched. But
it's not your imagina-
tion. It's all part of an
initiative to improve
hand hygiene com-
pliance. And it's
working.
Who's watching? Everybody, and that's what's making the differ-
ence.
Like many facilities, we used to rely on secret observers who stole
furtive glances out of the corners of their eyes and recorded whether
you were washing your hands. And it actually worked pretty well for
a lot of years. Our compliance rate was comparatively high: between
80% and 85%.
But people got tired of that approach, and we couldn't seem to
budge the rate any higher. Plus, if we're totally honest, the rate might
not have been quite that high. No one was supposed to know who the
spies were, but naturally, people sometimes did. And it's well known
that people sometimes change their behavior when they know they're
being watched. That's called the Hawthorne Effect.
1 1 4 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • M A Y 2 0 1 6
Infection Prevention
Jeanie Brown, BSN, RN, CNOR, Crystal Meyers, BSN, RN, CNOR
and Gretchen Steelman, MBA, BSN, RN, CNOR
Pamela
Bevelhymer,
RN,
BSN
• SEEING IS BELIEVING By involving everyone in hand-hygiene surveillance, we
improved our compliance to better than 95%.
