Hi everyone,
Accreditation was a great reminder of the importance of hand hygiene and how critical it is for providing safe patient care in a patient-centered environment. UHN's hand hygiene program was recently singled out by the accreditors as an effective approach for promoting staff and public awareness of hospital-acquired infections and the importance of routine hand hygiene. Our success is due in part to everyone's commitment to patient safety and hard work!
Promoting hand hygiene in order to prevent hospital-acquired infections is a priority that is shared by the provincial government. Starting next spring, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care will require that all hospitals publicly report their hand hygiene compliance (more information to follow in the New Year).
As part of UHN's hand hygiene program, the Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) Department has been conducting internal hand hygiene audits of all inpatient units for the past 10 months. These audits, which were conducted by IPAC staff, included meetings with unit leadership to discuss the process used to gather information and provided expertise and feedback to units on their hand hygiene compliance rates. To increase our ability to audit more units across UHN, we will be continuing the next round of audits without advanced notice starting December 4. The department will continue sharing data with units in an effort to raise awareness and to increase our organizational hand hygiene compliance. The auditor will make their presence known to the staff and unit manager upon arrival and they will likely remain on the floor for two days. Ambulatory and other patient care areas can contact IPAC if they are interested in being audited. The contact is Leah Gitterman at leah.gitterman@uhn.on.ca
If you would like additional education sessions or information on the audit process, IPAC would be more than happy to meet with you. More information about UHN's hand hygiene strategy can be found under "What's New!" on the IPAC Intranet site or by emailing
infectioncontrol@uhn.on.ca
Thank you for your cooperation and for your ongoing commitment to patient safety!
Bob
