Free patient video on hand washing
Free patient video on hand washing
CDC, APIC seek to empower patients
With 100,000 infected patients a year leaving hospitals under a sheet, we are way past the day when cultural barriers and awkwardness gave patients pause about reminding health care workers to wash their hands. Indeed, patients and their advocates must remind caregivers to wash their hands with an irritating consistency. To firm them to this task — indeed, giving them an official sanction to do so — two major epidemiological organizations have developed a hand hygiene video that is designed to be viewed on admission much like those preflight safety movies routinely seen on airplanes.
The video was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Available in English and Spanish, the video teaches two key points to hospital patients and visitors to help prevent infections: the importance of practicing hand hygiene while in the hospital, and that it is appropriate to ask or remind their health care providers to practice hand hygiene as well.
"These infections can be serious and hard to treat, but there's one simple thing you and your family can do to help prevent these infections — wash your hands and make sure that everyone who touches you — including your doctor — cleanses their hands, too," John Jernigan, MD, a CDC medical epidemiologist, says in the video.
Indeed, one actor in the instructional film even goes so far as to ask a doctor — who claims clean hands upon room entry — "If you wouldn't mind, I'd like you to do it again in front of me." Sounds unbelievable? Remember, culture change takes time but does occur. Who knows, we may get to the point where hand hygiene is so engrained, instructional videos will be like the airline attendant displaying proper seatbelt technique while being flagrantly ignored by the newspaper-reading passengers. Notice, though, that they usually cast a furtive glance toward the closest exit. They're thinking, like the hospital patient, "I need to get out of here alive."
(Editor's note: Free copies of the instructional DVD are available at http://www.preventinfection.org/AM.)
With 100,000 infected patients a year leaving hospitals under a sheet, we are way past the day when cultural barriers and awkwardness gave patients pause about reminding health care workers to wash their hands. Indeed, patients and their advocates must remind caregivers to wash their hands with an irritating consistency.Subscribe Now for Access
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