An effort to sustain hand hygiene compliance.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Campbell, Lisa
• Date: 01 March 2013

At Eastern Health in Victoria, one of the key focus priorities from our Chief Executive Officer for 2012 was hand hygiene.

In sub-acute and long term care we accepted this challenge with enthusiasm. We held education sessions; increased our presence on wards and in our long term care facilities; used talking hands at the entrances to ward; recruited assistance from nurse liaisons on the wards and long term care facilities; and rotated signage on a regular basis so that the messages were being seen by our staff and visitors. Allied health staff in sub-acute and all staff in long term care were provided with individual bottles of hand rub to improve access to product.

We have achieved compliance rates of 87% across sub-acute and long term care. The real question we then asked ourselves was: "how can...