Hand Hygiene

The CDC recently updated its guidance to state that face masks provide some personal protection against COVID-19 for those who wear them, not just for those around them.

In 2019, approximately 43% of schools globally did not have access to basic hand washing with soap and water, and 818 million children lacked basic hand-washing facilities at school, according to data from a WHO/UNICEF monitoring program.

The situation with COVID-19, or the currently circulating coronavirus, is developing so rapidly that new information may likely be available by the time you reach the end of this paragraph. But along with factual information, misinformation also abounds on social media, on cable news channels and in print publications. Healio Rheumatology will attempt to set the record straight for health care providers looking to sort out fact from fiction.

Researchers tested the skin, clothing and personal protective equipment, or PPE, of health care workers after caring for patients and found they are routinely contaminated with respiratory viruses, demonstrating the importance of complete hand hygiene and appropriate PPE use and doffing practices to prevent transmission of pathogens, they said.

Researchers observed low rates of overall hand hygiene adherence among health care workers at six skilled nursing facilities, according to findings published in a recent study. They also found that glove use and job title were associated with higher hand hygiene adherence.

The CDC launched a national campaign called Life is Better with Clean Hands to promote the importance of hand-washing among adults.

National infection prevention experts, led by the CDC’s Health Research & Educational Trust, have developed a new curriculum focused on infection control.

A comparison of N95 respirators and medical masks for the prevention of influenza demonstrated no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza among health care workers in outpatient settings, according to findings from The Respiratory Protection Effectiveness Clinical Trial (ResPECT).

Interest in monitoring hand hygiene compliance using automated technology has “increased substantially” in recent years, according to researchers, who found that not all electronic hand hygiene monitoring systems are created equal.

Overall hand hygiene compliance increased during a 2-year “friendly competition” in the Netherlands in which staff at 10 health care centers were observed and ranked based on their compliance, according to researchers.