Hand hygiene performance

These products are used by healthcare workers, patients, consumers and visitors in hospitals and clinics to clean hands and help prevent the spread of infection from one place or person to another.

Hand hygiene in hospitals is measured through an audit process, in which trained observers watch for points in time, called moments, when hand washing or cleaning with alcohol rubs ought to occur to ensure good infection control practices.

The five hand hygiene moments are:

1. Before touching a patient
2. Before carrying out a procedure, such as cleaning a wound, putting a line into a vein
3. After a procedure or body fluid exposure risk
4. After touching a patient
5. After touching a patient’s surroundings

Why is this measure important?

Good hand hygiene is one of the most effective ways to minimise the risk of healthcare-associated infections. Visual observation is the best way of ensuring that good hand hygiene is being carried out within a hospital.

What are we doing to continue to improve?

Our auditors have been trained so they can give feedback to staff to make sure they are performing hand hygiene when required in their day-to-day care of patients. This will reduce the risk of infection in our patients.

Once the audits have been completed, each ward or department can monitor their compliance with the standards using our online systems / applications. The compliance is a measure of the moments where hand hygiene was successfully done over the total number of moments observed, as a percentage.

Ward staff, patients and consumers are given feedback on the compliance. All staff are required to complete online hand hygiene education.

How can you help us to improve hand hygiene?

While staff take the lead on hand hygiene compliance, you play a critical role in helping to prevent infections by following the same principles. We ask that:

• Visitors wash their hands with soap and water or use hand rub / cleaning gel before and after patient and consumer contact. Hand rub or cleaning gel pumps are available in public areas across all the RMH locations, including public areas, ward entrances and in all patient and consumer rooms.
• Patients and consumers wash their hands after visiting the toilet, blowing their nose and before all meals.
• Anyone with a fever, cold or flu symptoms, diarrhoea or vomiting should not visit the hospital until they are well, for the sake of patients’ and consumers’ safety.

We also encourage you to speak up and remind health care teams and clinicians to wash their hands.

Find out more about preventing infection.