Hand hygiene is an important practice for health-care providers but also involves everyone in the hospital, including patients, families and visitors. Effective hand hygiene practices in hospitals plays a key role in improving patient and staff safety, and in preventing the spread of infections.
We report on our hand hygiene compliance rates annually, and these rates are typically posted online at the end of April each year. To see our hand hygiene rates click here. You can also access these rates on the patient safety pages of the Health Quality Ontario website.
To calculate our hand hygiene compliance, we first take the number of times that hand hygiene was performed before initial patient, or patient environment contact. We do this again after patient or patient environment contact. This number is divided by the number of observed hand hygiene indications for that specific instance. The results are then multiplied by 100. This calculation represents the percentage compliance rate for hand hygiene for our hospital.
The collection and reporting of our hand hygiene compliance rate allows us to establish a baseline from which we track hand hygiene improvement over the course of time. We then use this information to identify areas with opportunities for improvement and create strategies to reduce the incidence of health-care-associated infections.
