Hospital staff told: wash your hands

Audit results posted on the MyHospitals website shows that the Canberra Hospital failed to meet a benchmark standard for complying with hand hygiene standards last year.

Hospital staff are supposed to wash their hands before and after touching a patient and after a procedure. Auditors observed Canberra Hospital staff complying with the standards about 65 per cent of the time, compared to a benchmark of 70 per cent.

Calvary Public Hospital achieved the benchmark.

Canberra Hospital Division of Medicine executive director Rosemary O'Donnell said the results reflected the fact that the first year of a hand hygiene project had been focussed on nine specific wards.

The audit had been undertaken in other wards.

Ms O'Donnell said the hand hygiene initiative was now being rolled out across the hospital. Written information encouraged patients to ask staff if they had washed their hands. ''With the rollout of this standard, we're now doing every ward and with the training of the auditors we're now actually getting them to do it on a monthly basis and embed it in every ward,'' Ms O'Donnell said.

The hospital hoped to encourage competition between the wards.

''We've got all of these new auditors, we're rolling this out and really heightening awareness, especially among medical staff, because historically in most jurisdictions - not just the ACT - medical staff are the ones that fall down and bring the percentage down,'' Ms O'Donnell said.