A simple but lifesaving message — Hand Hygiene Saves Lives — is the core of an institution-wide campaign starting Oct. 19.

“After more than 150 years of pleading, prodding and surveying physicians and health care workers, adherence to hand hygiene practices remains low,” explained Lucy Tompkins, the Lucy Becker Professor in Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology and chief of infectious diseases and geographic medicine. “We ask all of you - as we tell ourselves - to serve as role models for students, trainees and other health care workers so that hand hygiene becomes a ritual, automatic behavior. While hand hygiene is not new, it is extremely important in maintaining a safe hospital environment and in saving lives,” added Tompkins.

Beginning Oct. 19 posters will be placed throughout the institution reminding healthcare workers and patients that Hand Hygiene Saves Lives. All staff and physicians will:

Receive letters re-affirming SHC’s commitment to the JCAHO’s National Patient Safety Goal 7, which seeks to “reduce the risk of health-care acquired infections: comply with current CDC hand hygiene guidelines.”

Buttons will be made available with the “Hand Hygiene Saves Lives” icon

All healthcare workers will be encouraged to remind other healthcare workers and physicians to practice hand hygiene.

The awareness campaign will occur throughout the month of November.

The initiative was developed by the Infection Control and Epidemiology Department and is sponsored by the Infection Control Committee and the Patient Care Services Department.

“Although not a new advance in medicine, hand hygiene is a simple, time-tested preventive measure that has saved lives ever since Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in the 1840s that hand washing sharply reduced infection and deaths among new mother’s in the Vienna obstetrics unit where he practiced,” Tompkins noted.

“But despite the fact that hand hygiene is the most important activity for preventing health-care associated (nosocomial) infections, scores of observational studies demonstrate poor compliance by healthcare workers and physicians, Tompkins said. “The literature shows that in the United States compliance with hand hygiene averages 40 percent to 60 percent, and Stanford Hospital and clinics is no exception.”

“The reasons given by healthcare workers and physicians for lack of compliance with hand hygiene are many: 1) time required, 2) a perception that the recommended frequency of hand washing is excessive, 3) fear that frequent hand washing will lead to dermatitis and 4) limited access to sinks and hand hygiene products. These barriers can be overcome with the alcohol-based hand gel solutions that are available throughout our institution,” said Sasha Madison, manager of infection control and epidemiology.

Tompkins and Madison suggest that if physicians want to check current research on the topic, they can start with:

Weinstein RA, Hand Hygiene – Of Reason and Ritual. "Annals of Internal Medicine" 2004, 141:65-66.

Dubner, SJ, Selling Soap. "The New York Times Magazine", Sept. 24, 2006