Welcome back everybody, at Inside Infection Control, our video series here at CDC's Project Firstline.
I'm Abby Carlson. I'm an infectious diseases doctor at the CDC.
And, as always, it's great to have you with us today.
We're going to talk about hand hygiene.
Hand hygiene comes up all the time and, honestly, ever since you were a little kid, right?
Wash your hands. Wash your hands before dinner.
Wash your hands after you go to the bathroom.
Wash your hands.
We know the message.
But today we're going to talk about hand hygiene in healthcare
and why we talk about it so much and so often.
And the simple answer is,
when you clean your hands, you're stopping the spread of germs--
to your patients, to the environment, and to the things in the environment,
and from your patients, or the environment, to you.
We touch a lot of things with our hands throughout the day.
We don't really realize how much.
But when we use our hands, stuff gets on them.
And that's in addition to the stuff that is already on them.
So when we touch the next thing, whatever's on our hands can get on that thing.
And whatever is on that thing is going to get on our hands.
It's a big way to say that germs are everywhere,
at work, in the healthcare setting, but also at home and also in the community
when you're running your errands and doing your shopping.
And it's why there are so many messages for everyone to keep their hands clean.
But in healthcare, hand hygiene, or cleaning your hands, is especially important.
We're caring for patients who are ill and weak, and they are more vulnerable to infection.
So we want to make sure we don't spread germs to them.
And at work we're more likely to come into contact with blood, body fluids
and other things that may be carrying germs constantly throughout the day.
Let's take nursing as an example.
Our nursing staff, they touch up to 15 different surfaces during a single patient interaction.
For the average nurse, that is 912 different surfaces in a 12-hour shift.
Every one of those surfaces has germs on it.
So from that standpoint,
it makes sense why cleaning your hands and using gloves correctly are so important.
Hands are really good at spreading germs because we use them so much, yes.
But it's also because parts of our hands, to be honest, are pretty welcoming to germs.
They are pretty great at growing bugs.
In between our fingers, it's warm, and it can be damp.
And germs love this environment. It's a great place to grow bacteria.
Same thing under our nails.
Our fingernails--underneath there, they're warm, they're damp, they're dark--
another great place with dirt and skin cells
and other nutrients that bacteria can live in and grow in.
So, third thing, if you have a break in your skin, that's another hot zone,
both for the germs to get from the environment into you and onto you,
and for germs that are on your skin to get into the environment.
Because it's such a wet spot, usually, where you have a break in the skin.
So, when we're talking about germs on your hands, what are we really talking about?
Well, there are viruses, including the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2.
Some viruses can easily travel on skin and hands.
Then there are a lot of bacteria, especially things like Staph aureus or C. difficile,
which are bacteria that we see a lot in healthcare and worry about a lot,
because they cause big problems.
Funguses, spores, those can be on your hands.
Some funguses actually live on your skin.
And as we talked about in the episode on cleaning and disinfection,
many of the germs that we see in healthcare are resistant to antibiotics,
meaning that the drugs that we would use to treat somebody who's sick with those bugs
may not work as well.
We don't want any germs to spread in healthcare,
but we're even more concerned about those antibiotic-resistant germs
because of the limited options that we have for treating patients who get sick with them.
So, washing your hands removes dirt, removes some germs, even might kill some germs.
And alcohol-based hand sanitizer kills the germs.
And we'll talk more about these two ways we can clean our hands in another episode.
So, you can see why it's so important not to skip this topic of hand hygiene,
the one that we've been hearing about since we were kids,
and, not to forget why it's so important now that we're part of the healthcare world.
As always, thanks for joining us.
Please be sure to follow-up with us.
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Check us out as well on our website, CDC.gov/ProjectFirstline
We will see you back here with the next episode.