Try using songs to teach handwashing
Accreditation Connection, May 1, 2006
Upper Shore Community Mental Health Center in Chestertown, MD, looked to nursery rhymes to remind staff to wash their hands properly. And the tactic works, says Elizabeth Jackson, director of infection control.
Washing your hands properly takes about as long as it does to sing "Yankee Doodle Dandy"-about 15 seconds, Jackson says.
"So I put up signs up (with the lyrics) in all the bathrooms and with handwashing directions, and I started getting grief from nursing staff that I didn't do an original song," she says.
In response, she decided to hold a lyric-writing contest for staff. Songs had to be about 15 seconds long and fit into the melody of a well-known nursery rhyme.
One of Upper Shore's tunes mimicked "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," but instead used the phrase "Scrub, Scrub, Scrub Your Hands."
"I got several entries, and we used them for many years," Jackson says. "And the Joint Commission came in and saw them in the restrooms, and they wanted to copy them."
Adapted from the April 2006 issue of Briefings on Infection Control, an HCPro newsletter.
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