Some of the things we tried were to encourage people to speak up during the times when they saw people washing their hands— as silly as it may seem— but just to get people talking about hand hygiene. I count those as wins when people are thinking about it and talking to each other about it.” |
policy oversight; we even built into our observation program, some opportunities where one can make observations on nail compliance. I have some serious questions of how valid those observations are, and it seems like we’ re great, but when I walk around I still see plenty of nurses, who have, while not tiger claws, but nails that are longer that a quarter inch. Regarding the NICU, like everywhere, we almost got to where we were stating these are the rules and everybody is going to be compelled to comply. I think we got right to the edge of the cliff, we blanched and didn’ t go through with it.”
Other questions from town hall attendees focused on conducting covert observations, as well as how long to typically observe in one session.
“ One of the ways we designed it for our staff was to truly build it into their daily care provision to patients,” Linam explained.“ We don’ t have anybody saying,‘ Go observe for an hour.’ Instead, we set an expectation of making 20 observations over the course of the month, trying to observe different people, different types of healthcare workers, different moments,
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and fold it into your care. We try to teach them to pick somebody out and then watch them as they go in or come out of a room and then record it, and you’ re done. In those situations, I feel like even if you know that someone’ s an observer, you’ ve probably been observed before you would even realize it, because it’ s sort of an in-and-out situation. What most people do is they’ ll conduct one or two observations at a time, kind of bouncing through their daily work. So, there’ s not a lot of time for other personnel to realize that there’ s an observer watching them and warn others. So, I think that’ s helped, but we have our own biases that we’ re still trying to work through, too, but that is how we combat potential bias.”
The panelists next addressed the topic of product-use metrics.
“ I think we’ re mostly using them as part of the Leapfrog criteria, not for any targeted improvement efforts or as a surrogate for hand hygiene use,” Shenoy shared.
Sickbert-Bennett noted,“ We have used them before more as a secondary measure when we first launched our program and we believed to have seen an increase
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When we first launched the program, we had little badge stickers where people took a pledge basically saying‘ I agree, everyone forgets, and I want to be reminded.’ Not that it wasn’ t okay to remind anybody, but just that it was a visible cue that many people had accepted this pledge and that it was something we all needed to help hold each other accountable for.” |