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Electronic Hand Hygiene Monitoring and ICU Infection Rates

NCT02511925 · Status: COMPLETED · Type: OBSERVATIONAL · Enrollment: 1065

Last updated 2015-07-30

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

If patients acquire a new infection whilst in hospital this can cause significant morbidity, prolonged hospitalisation and even death. Indeed, there is much public concern about infections such as MRSA. Patients who require intensive care are probably at the greatest risk.

Appropriate hand hygiene by healthcare workers can reduce infection rates and is a key goal of many patient safety initiatives. Worldwide, hand hygiene compliance has been estimated at only 38.7% despite the intervention being simple and cheap. Reasons for poor compliance include lack of time, skin irritation, lack of facilities, intensity of workload and forgetfulness. Furthermore, since cross infection may not be apparent for some days, staff may not associate their (lack of) actions with having caused harm.

Measuring compliance levels enables staff to understand whether they could improve. Direct observation of staff is labour intensive and is not continuous or universal. We will monitor hand hygiene compliance with a newly developed electronic system (MedSense, General Sensing Inc.). We will use the data to provide feedback to the staff in several ways. We hypothesise that comprehensive personalised feedback will reduce healthcare associated infections. We will undertake the study in three intensive care units.

Conditions

  • Cross Infection

Interventions

OTHER

Weekly poster of unit performance

Weekly feedback is provided to the ICU about current levels of hand hygiene compliance amongst doctors, nurses, and allied healthcare professionals

OTHER

Daily email of personal feedback

Healthcare workers receive private and personal feedback via email regarding their individual performance benchmarked against the average performance for their professional grouping.

OTHER

Active reminder from badge

The badge the healthcare worker is wearing vibrates if opportunities to perform hand hygiene are missed

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Patricia Cattini, MSc · Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust

Eligibility

Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2013-11-30
Primary Completion
2014-07-31
Completion
2014-07-31

Countries

  • United Kingdom

Study Locations

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Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT02511925 on ClinicalTrials.gov