Scheduling expands the range of risks addressed Introduction: Scheduled inspections are a reward for consistently following food safety processes with regulatory clearance. A scheduled inspection system as in Olmsted County Minnesota, “PTV”, converts the common “raid” atmosphere into teachable moments. Let’s encourage this improvement and free our 30,000+ inspectors to first instruct. This provides a […]
Raising Handwashing While Lowering Staff Turnover
How to begin: Start by hiring smarter … Hire managers with leadership skills to help employees reach and sustain their professional handwashing standards. Don’t hire employees with nervous habits of unconscious twitches and touches of their face or hair. Hire people with cleanable hands. Convey your business and customer service philosophies clearly … Define hand […]
The Limits of Handwash Training
Why training may be blocking progress Our world of restaurant food safety is blessed with a cadre of good trainers and creative programs. This has been true for at least the last decade as more technology now leverages the messaging. Successful? How do we measure success? The trainer infuses knowledge, technique and “training session motivation”. […]
Pathogen Zapping UV for Cleaner Surfaces Faster
Advances in UV technology are paving the path to everyday use in acute care facilities. It is being integrated with healthcare’s more traditional surface cleaning tools. Trained users remove from a patient room those fragile items that might sustain physical damage. Visible surface soils are cleaned with spray cleaners and wipes. Remaining furnishings and equipment […]
The “Jacks or Better” Factor in Lowering the Risk of Foodborne Outbreaks
How Hand Hygiene Monitoring Gets You in the Game Well implemented technology-assisted monitoring of handwashing behaviors is a potential game-changer in food safety but it does share one major weakness with its historic standard, observation. Neither is a stand-alone fix. They merely provide an assessment of current behaviors and evidence of the current customer-care culture. […]
Hospital Chef Specs Technology To Motivate Handwashing
First to Earn Handwashing For Life’s 5 Star Hand Hygiene Award Chef Peter Fulgenzi assessed his operation’s risk for hospital acquired infections as step one of his study. He then set safe levels on both handwashing quality and frequency. His 15 handsink stations were optimized and he completed rigorous staff training along with a tightening […]
The “Jacks or Better” Factor in Lowering the Risk of HAI’s.
How Hand Hygiene Monitoring Gets You in the Game Well implemented technology-assisted monitoring of hand hygiene behaviors is a potential game changer in patient and resident safety but it does share one major weakness with its historic standard, secret shopper protocols. Neither is a stand-alone fix. They merely provide an assessment of current behaviors and evidence of […]
The Power of the Hospital CEO to Drive Change
Beckers Hospital Review recently published two articles that drove powerful messages with a common theme. Imbedded in the context of “The Four Characteristics of a Strong Safety Culture”1 and “How a No-Nonsense Hospital CEO Reached the Target of Zero Infections”2, was a singular message. To create a strong patient safety culture to reduce Nosocomial Infections, leadership must […]
2014 CFP Hand Hygiene Success: Groundwork for 2016
A recommendation of “No Action” at the CFP (Conference for Food Protection) can be viewed as a strike out and to continue the baseball metaphor, Handwashing For Life went 0 for 7 on the issues submitted in 2014. We thought at least one would be accepted but all were presented as a foundation for 2016. […]
What is a Better Number, 3% or 80%?
Most people would respond saying “That depends on what those numbers correlate to”. Let’s put these numbers into perspective. John M. Boyce, MD, of the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven, CONN and clinical professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine (2011) states that less than 1 percent to 3 percent of […]
