How do you know if your employees are sanitizing their hands? Are they doing it correctly, and at the appropriate times?
At Mirador Health, we work with healthcare facilities to create a digital data point for hand sanitization events. This allows medical facilities to increase and improve hand hygiene and reduces the need for manual processes like visual confirmation or secret shoppers by capturing every employee hand sanitization event by time, location, and liquid distribution.
Per the CDC,1 a healthcare professional should use alcohol-based hand sanitizer or wash with soap and water when hands are visibly dirty, including after touching blood or other bodily fluids, mucous membranes, open wounds, or dressings; before eating or drinking and after using the bathroom, handling trash, coughing, or sneezing.
Unless hands are observably soiled, an alcohol-based hand sanitizer is preferred over soap and water in most clinical instances due to better employee engagement and compliance compared to washing with soap.
There are also certain clinical diagnoses and scenarios that require hand washing before, after and/or during patient engagement. We have collected resources from across the Joint Commission, CDC, FDA and more to provide a one-stop-shop for sanitization and handwashing information. Check out our FAQ here if you’d like to read more.
Broadly, the following is a summary of when healthcare professionals should have Hand Hygiene Events:
- Upon entering or exiting a patient room
- Prior to and after physical contact with a patient, whether or not gloves are worn
- Before conducting an aseptic event or touching invasive medical devices
- After cleansing or contact with a dirtied body site to a clean body site on the same patient
- Subsequently touching a patient or the direct contact with patient environment
- Following contact with blood, body fluids, or contaminated surfaces
- Before handling medications or preparing food
- Directly after removing gloves
The Mirador Health system can capture and document events and assist in tracking hand sanitization with data. By providing clear, visual reports, you can easily identify areas where employees are falling short and then work to make improvements. By capturing every detail of hand hygiene event, your facility will be able to increase events, reduce manual processes and provide a digital record to employees’ compliance.
We know that it takes a team to ensure compliance. Every member of staff, from Infection Prevention and Sterile Processing through to Healthcare IT, Facilities, Environmental Services and Clinicals all must be working in concert, cross-functionally, to provide the safest environment of care. At Mirador, we are our Mirador Guardian TM dispensers, and we are our cloud application. We can help bridge the gap between your on-the-ground staff and the information needed to drive positive results, without impacting the critical work that your teams do every day.
Our goal is to increase hand hygiene, drive compliance and save lives!
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