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 […]
The 2014 Conference For Food Protection
Summary of proposed hand hygiene solutions The biennial meeting of The Conference For Food Protection (CFP) opens this week in Orlando. So many disparate views are represented within the ranks of the CFP but all share a single goal – to protect home and away-from-home public health. Breakdowns in hand hygiene systems remain perhaps the […]
The Seven Sins of Observation – Are we in the Dark Ages?
A decade ago direct observation of Health Care Workers (HCW’s) by their peers became the “Gold Standard” in the health care community to benchmark hand hygiene compliance. Although the spread of Nosocomial Infections or commonly called Health-Care Associated Infections (HAI’s) is a complex problem, it is widely accepted that up to 50% of HAI’s are […]
The Unwritten Food Code
The ‘prescriptive’ nature of the food code is now being understood by local health officials as: ‘The health authority prescribes how a task is done and the operator is responsible to do the task as prescribed.’ This interpretation, which differs from the traditional approach of Food Code which defined the minimum standard needed and operators […]
