Cost-effective unit compliance information that
identifies problem areas
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Click image to enlarge |
This program
provides a hand hygiene report for every unit in
your healthcare facility in a cost-effective approach.
Monthly reports, when used as feedback, encourage increased
hand hygiene frequency and help you target observation
monitoring where you need it the most: units where healthcare workers are not washing
their hands!
Simplicity
in methodology
MMI provides you with an
implementation tools to
ensure common methodology with a Patient Safety
Organization. Once a month, send MMI
your product usage summary by unit, and the patient days
(or visits for out-patient units). We'll factor the
dosage, populate the record, and apply the benchmarks
for similar facilities, and return a report to you in a
few days.
No equipment or
software to buy, no additional staff to train
and supervise. Use the information easily
obtainable in your facility. Hospitals in our
program use any combination of these tactics to gather
data:
1.
Pictured at left, collect the product containers as they are
emptied.
Store in a central location (housekeeping area
typically) and count before discarding. Or,
2. Include product
replacement category on housekeeping check-off clipboard
so that housekeeping marks off when and where they
replaced a product. We have examples. Or,
3.
Ask materials management to provide you with their
monthly tally for ordering product per unit. Many
managers (pictured at left) already keep this data.
If you use electronic hand
hygiene sensors
for counting some of your product coverage such as from
sanitizer dispensers, but the electronic coverage does not
include soap, pocket sanitizers, portable sanitizer bottles,
or wipes, you can submit your electronic counts to MMI along
with your data from the rest of the hand hygiene products
you use to provide a complete account of your
hand hygiene activity.
This is data you already
have access to, and in many cases, already track. It's
that simple.
Avoid
unnecessary expenses: Know where to $pend and where to $ave
The JC and WHO
stipulate a minimum number of observations you should be
performing in order to measure compliance. This is
the standard. However, you are not able to
observe all healthcare workers all of the time. Observation
can cost as high as $36,000 a year in salary hours for
observing and reporting. And, that only covers
between 3%-24% of the time healthcare workers are
performing services in the hospital.
Since getting data is costly, you could be focusing your observation on units
where hand hygiene is already shown to be poor in a more
cost effective approach. Product usage measurement
will target those underperforming units.
These graph illustrations show hand
hygiene frequency (the number of hand hygiene events per
patient per day) on four different units. Compare the
magenta lines on each
graph. Three graphs ("Unit 1", "Unit 2", "Unit 3")
show a positive increase - healthcare workers are
performing hand hygiene more frequently than at
baseline. "Unit 4" graph
depicts a unit whose time-trend magenta line remains
flat (no increase in frequency over time).
After comparing these
graphs, the Infection Preventionist could focus more
observation time to the lower-performing unit to determine why
frequency is not increasing.
(Otherwise if you spread your observation resources
among all units above, you're observing units already
showing handwashing activity). Of course you
wouldn't ignore the good units, you want feedback on
technique, too. But with product usage
measurement, you've identified a problem, now observe
why.
Feedback and
Discussion
Of course, team feedback and
discussion sheds more light than observation alone! In one example, an IP assigned
observers to a unit which was showing a sudden drop in
usage for January and February compared to other units'
product usage reports. Observers spent more time
on that unit. The findings? Healthcare
workers were using leftover scented soaps and sanitizers
people generously gave them for the holidays. So
they thought they were being compliant but in fact they
were not using healthcare-tested product that was being
recorded in MMI's program. Feedback through
discussion re-directed their well intended efforts!
In another example, an IP
noticed a sudden drop in product usage compliance in
nearly all units in the same month. She showed the
reports to her team. The response? Since the
hospital just passed a Joint Commission survey,
healthcare workers felt they could relax on compliance
and usage. After reviewing reports as feedback,
compliance increased once again.
We have just explained to
you the specific measurement program and applications as reviewed by the Joint Commission in the
monograph for hand hygiene adherence and by AHRQ when
including MMI as a listed Patient Safety
Organization.
To
learn more about how your reports will look,
go to next page.
