More than half of all health-care workers within the Interior Health Authority aren’t washing their hands — and doctors are among the worst offenders.
Through a Freedom of Information request, KTW has learned 55 per cent of IHA employees didn’t perform proper hand hygiene during a health hand-hygiene initiative conducted from Oct. 15 to Oct. 19 last year.
The initiative, in conjunction with Bayer Healthcare Clean Hands For Life campaign, collected data on hand-hygiene practices across Kootenay Boundary, Okanagan and Thompson-Cariboo-Shuswap health service areas at 23 acute- and residential-care sites to improve hand-washing compliance of all IHA employees to reduce the rate of health-care-associated infections.
Even though hand-washing is the single-most effective way to prevent the spread of communicable diseases and infections, Royal Inland Hospital came in around the national average, with employee adherence to hand-washing at 46 per cent.
Being within a national benchmark is usually a good thing — except when hand-washing standards are low to begin with, said Martin McMahon, the IHA’s chief of planning and quality improvement.
“This is one that’s a challenge right across the Canadian health-care system,” McMahon said.
“Compliance with what is, to some extent, a very rudimentary and elementary safety practice is something that causes a lot of concern in our organization and in hospitals right across Canada.”
McMahon said hand-washing is an extremely simple and cheap intervention that professionals and other health-care workers can take, and one that has proven safety returns for patients.
“This isn’t a $10-million thing you need to do,” he said, adding all IHA facilities have alcohol hand-wipe dispensers as well as liquid sanitation stations, promoting hand hygiene to employees and visitors.
Nevertheless, even with hand-sanitation stations, some IHA facilities showed low compliance rates, such as Kelowna General Hospital at 21 per cent and Brookhaven Care Centre (also in Kelowna) at 17 per cent.
In addition, the initiative looked at hand-washing compliance by health -care workers and the least compliant were lab technicians, at 24 per cent, and physicians, at 34 per cent.
The most compliant were medical students, at 71 per cent.
So why are the medical newcomers more aware of the need to wash their hands than knowledgeable doctors?
McMahon pointed to a study done by the World Health Organization that found children with good hand-hygiene practices carried them into adulthood.
“Our efforts have to be focused at the professionals and other workers in the health-care system, but it seems there’s evidence, in fact, that childhood education and early schooling is likely to be one of the most successful strategies,” he said.
“I’m not going to make that link, but you can see that in some of the data.”
Although he acknowledged the difficulty in changing behaviour, McMahon said increased awareness and peer pressures within the health industry should make a difference.
“We’re certainly trying to elevate the tone of these discussions and the serious nature of this in terms of the risk to the patient fundamentally.”
Beyond patient risk is the possibility of physicians and other professionals bringing microorganisms and other viruses home to their families and into the general population.
McMahon said the IHA is looking to increase hand hygiene through more hand-washing posters, bulletins and random audits in facilities.
“We want to take it to a whole new level where we can see that increase beyond the national numbers.”
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