A recent study found not all of U.S. health facilities do not make alcohol-based hand sanitizer available at every point of care.
Simply placing these dispensers in key spots could help prevent a number of hospital-acquired infections, an Elsevier news release reported.
The researchers found "half of the hospitals, ambulatory care, and long-term care facilities had set aside funds in their budgets for hand hygiene training," the news release reported. The researchers looked at 168 facilities in 42 states and Puerto Rico and found only 77.5 had hand sanitizer available at every point of care.
About one in 10 of these facilities reported whoever was in charge of the facility did not make a "clear commitment" to improving .
"When hospitals don't focus heavily on hand hygiene, that puts patients at unnecessary risk for preventable health care-associated infections," Laurie Conway, RN, MS, CIC, PhD student at Columbia Nursing, said in the news release. "The tone for compliance with infection control guidelines is set at the highest levels of management, and our study also found that executives aren't always doing all that they can to send a clear message that preventing infections is a priority."
About 100,000 Americans get hospital-acquired infections every year, these cost about $33 billion to treat.
"The survey also shows that facilities participating in the WHO global hand hygiene campaign achieved a higher level of progress," co-author Prof. Didier Pittet, MD, MS, Director, Infection Control Program and WHO Collaborating Center on Patient Safety, University of Geneva Hospitals and Faculty of Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland, said in the news release. "While hand hygiene compliance is the responsibility of every health care worker, U.S. health care facilities would certainly benefit from coordinated national and sub-national efforts aimed at hand hygiene improvement. They would also gather innovative ideas and trans-cultural approaches by participating in global efforts such as the WHO campaign."
