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Handwashing becomes the backstop for the surface contamination in nursing homes
Dr. Kelly Reynolds, University of Arizona researcher, shares her experience in long-term care where the homelike environment challenges staff to keep pace with surface cleanliness standards. She finds that busy C-Suite decision-makers appreciate converting complicated research studies into pictures.
The referenced nursing home research is attached for your downloading and review. In a similar study conducted in acute care here is an animation of those results.
This animation is based on a research study conducted in a US hospital.
The researchers seeded the telephone in POD D with an easy to detect, inert DNA material (red dot) and then tracked it’s movement over the 8 hours of a single shift. Every 2 hours 32 swabs were done in each of the patient pods and 10 swabs in each of the staff common areas. Nurses were confined to one patient POD but could move freely to the common areas. Doctors, specialists and support staff could move as required. Obviously the patients weren’t mobile, they were just the victims of poor hand and surface hygiene.
What areas were most contaminated after the 8 hours?
