Hand Hygiene in Health Care Workers

Hand hygiene is a good preventive measure of hospital-acquired infections. Hand hygiene is the process of washing hands properly using a detergent or an antiseptic prior to or after attending to a patient (Hong et al. Hospital infections prolong the patients’ stay in the hospital and the rate of hospital re-admissions increases. According to Hong et al (2015), compliance with hand hygiene rules and regulations may reduce the length of hospital stay as well as the number of mortality rate. It is worth noting that the increase in mortality rate among the patients in a health facility may be determined by the cleanliness of the facility. The study revealed that hand hygiene education was very lacking thus endangering the lives in the health facility.

The study was conducted in Diyarbakir Training and Research Hospital. General hospital hygiene is very crucial. When the hospital staff does not follow simple rules and guidelines such as compliance to hand hygiene, the entire health facility becomes a danger zone. Kaya et al (2014) give an example of Semmelweis where mortality rate decreased by requiring physicians to practice hand hygiene. Hand hygiene compliance cannot work lack if lack adequate knowledge of the same. Staff education is paramount because every employee in the health facility would be made aware of the dangers and threats of operating in such an environment. The results obtained from the research conducted by Kaya et al. (2014) confirmed that despite a majority of the staff (74. 3%) having trained on hand hygiene, they felt that they needed more education.

Therefore, healthcare workers must be enlightened on proper sanitization measures to curb the spread of health infections. Currently, a majority of hospitals in the United States and abroad have implemented hand hygiene practices that are primarily focused on improving healthcare sanitization measures as they attend to different patients in their health facilities. The most dominant hand hygiene measures currently practiced involving alcohol scrubbing as well as thorough handwashing in order to reduce contamination of infections. Health acquired infections are believed to be pathogen contaminated infections that are mostly spread through the hands of the healthcare workers. Studies show thorough handwashing and alcohol scrubbing may help the spread of hospital infections but still, they are not the most effective measures. These results are not only shocking but also show how some health institutions have turned into dangerous death traps.

Health institutions must implement mandatory hand hygiene policies that should attract punishable penalties if any of the health workers do not comply. Although various studies conducted to shed more light on the prevalence of health-acquired infections have shown that non-compliance to hand hygiene is attributed to forgetfulness by the healthcare workers, it has emerged that some healthcare workers fail to comply to hand hygiene practices due to ignorance. Such individuals must be punished for risking the health of the patients. Numerous ways and practices have been recommended by different health organs in a bid to enforce hand hygiene in all health institutions Intervention The World Health Organization(WHO) proposed the five-strategy measures in a bid to help in addressing the prevalence of health acquired infections.