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Workshop to raise handwashing to Patient-Safe standard
Healthcare handwashing mirrors the data-short Restaurant issue. Handwashing For Life’s
research stretches from the watershed event of the early 1990s, the Jack-In-The-Box outbreak, to today’s Chipotle issues. The most consistent shortcoming in those 23 years, including these bookend events, is the lack of data for operators to invest in sustainable solutions. This same lack exists in healthcare.
Data drives a controllable process, reporting variances from standards. Handwashing, the #1contributing factor cited in outbreak investigations and the CDC’s primary recommended intervention for the spread of pathogens, has no standards to track. It’s like an airport without radar.
Thanks to technical advances, handwashing can now be a controllable process, making poor handwashing a matter of choice. This opens the door to potential legal actions with an increasing call from patients and relatives of long term residents seeking higher standards of care for their loved ones. How many of the 380,000 deaths in nursing homes last year were originated in their kitchens? Even if that number were as low as 10%, that is 38,000 deaths, annual deaths.
This Norovirus Summit III Workshop is designed to collaboratively assess current industry practices and evaluate proposed solutions. Attendance by cross-departmenal teams is encouraged to agree risk and a path of continuous improvement. The work groups will be divided into Healthcare and Non-healthcare teams.
Handwashing is the critical intervention for the spread of norovirus. We have known that for decades but still lack data on actual compliance. Is it inline with patient-safety standards?
There will be four different Electronic Compliance Monitoring (ECM) technologies demonstrated to help culinary caregivers go beyond observation. Each provides the numbers to reduce HAI risk and create a sustainable behavior change. This workshop offers a unique opportunity to “kick the tires” and “look under the hood” at this new vehicle to drive handwashing from chaos to control.
