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Ways to keep your hands clean

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, April 28, 2006

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Looking for fresh ideas to promote hand hygiene? Here's a look at two efforts you may be able to try in your hospital:

1. Rhyming with a reason.

Upper Shore Community Mental Health Center in Chestertown, MD, looked to nursery rhymes to remind staff to wash their hands properly.

Washing your hands properly takes about as long as it does to sing "Yankee Doodle Dandy"-about 15 seconds, says Elizabeth Jackson, director of infection control. Signs with the lyrics, as well as hand-washing directions, were put up to remind staff of this.

After getting grief for not writing an original song, Jackson decided to hold a lyric-writing contest for staff. Songs had to be about 15 seconds long and fit the melody of a well-known nursery rhyme. One of Upper Shore's tunes mimicked "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," but instead went by the phrase "Scrub, Scrub, Scrub Your Hands."

2. Flashy screensavers.

Blank computer screens became an open canvas for Nancy Childs, director of infection control and employee health at Holzer Medical Center in Gallipolis, OH.

Childs asked her information systems (IS) department to design a screensaver with a slogan, such as "Hand Hygiene Saves Lives," to place on staff's computers. The IS staff developed screensavers that display a series of photographs depicting clinical staff washing their hands based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines-from turning off faucets with paper towels to rubbing hands with alcohol-based hand gel before entering patient rooms.

To learn two more ideas for promoting hand hygiene, go to Briefings on Patient Safety (BOPS). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire April issue of BOPS. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of BOPS have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their April issue.

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