By Healthcare Facilities Today

Patients, family members and visitors play an important role in preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and ensuring patient safety, according to a blog on the Deb Group website. Healthcare organizations should share hand hygiene information and advice in a variety ways.  

Suggestions include:

• Advise patients, family members and visitors that healthcare workers should wash or clean their hands with alcohol-based rubs before touching a patient. 

• Make sure patients, family members and visitors know that they have to right to inquire about and question healthcare workers — even physicians – to assure that they follow the WHO Five Moments for Hand Hygiene.  

• Promote personal hand hygiene best practices to patients, family members and visitors.  Advise those who enter a patient’s room to clean their hands multiple times during the day—especially after eating and using the restroom.

• Engage family members and visitors in monitoring the cleanliness of the patient room — perhaps even wiping down bed rails, IV polls or bedside tables with disinfectant.  

• Provide a simplified but complete explanation of the hospital’s infection control program, including its use of protective clothing and gloves, hand cleaners, hand hygiene monitoring devices and adherence to guidelines for handling blood and other contaminated items.

Read the article.