Now let's take a closer look
at hand hygiene. It's been deemed that hand hygiene is the most important infection
control technique.
We need to make sure we disinfect our hands whenever they're visibly dirty
or contaminated, and definitely before having contact with patients,
putting on gloves, inserting invasive devices,
manipulating any invasive device, and after having contact with the patient's skin,
having contact with bodily fluids or excretions, not intact skin,
wound dressings, and contaminated items. And lastly,
when we remove our gloves. Now let's look specifically at how to practice proper
hand hygiene.
It has been found that actually alcohol-based hand rubs,
whether they're a foam or a gel, kill germs more effectively and more quickly than
hand washing with soap and water.
They're also, when combined with an aloe or some type of skin protectant,
are less damaging to the skin. It's a preferred method
unless you can see visible, dirty, some kind of contamination on the hands.
When we do this we're going to apply the
recommended amount of alcohol gel on to the hands.
And then we're gonna rub it over the full surface
of the hands, into the crevices, around the nail beds, the fingertips,
making sure we're getting full coverage of the hands.
And we're going to continue to rub these for no less than 20 seconds,
but especially until it's dry. We're not gonna use anything to actually dry them.
We're just gonna continue to rub it,
get it all over the surfaces of the skin in any little area that you think,
in between the fingers, around the thumbs,
in the crevices, until it's actually air dry.
Remember that we're gonna rub on the top of the hands as well.
Sometimes we get into a habit of just doing the surface, but
making sure we get into the nail beds, the cuticles, the fingertips, the surfaces
of the hand on the top,
and the bottom - all around. Now if we see that we have obvious
visual contamination on the hands, that's when we're going to have to move
to the actual soap and running method
of cleaning our hands. So if we have contamination on our
hands, and it's visible, then we need to use
hand soap and running water to decontaminate with.
If you have the ability to use a sink that you can activate with your foot
or with a knee bar, that's obviously the best way to go. But in this case we don't.
So we're gonna turn our water on and then we're gonna wet our hands.
So we're gonna go ahead and wet our hands. Take off any
watches or contaminated jewelry that will need to be decontaminated as well.
And then if you can't take off, like your wedding ring or another piece of
jewelry then we're just gonna clean around that and
underneath it. Once our hands are thoroughly wet we're gonna go ahead and
get soap. Adequate amount in the palm of your hand,
and then we begin to rub our hands. As we rub our hands we want to make sure
that we're
applying the soap to the top surfaces of our hands,
around the wrists, underneath the jewelry,
around the jewelry, in between the fingers, paying special attention to
crevices,
wrinkles, nail beds, cuticles, in between the fingers.
As we wash our hands, we're gonna make sure to do this for no less than 20
seconds,
in fact even some studies and recommendations are saying to go forty
to sixty seconds
with vigorous scrubbing and washing of
the hands, and the fingernails and the beds. Once we've washed that for the
recommended amount of time,
we're gonna go ahead and rinse the soap off our hands.
I like to watch everywhere else my arms, making sure like, with a short sleeve
shirt, that I don't have the other speckle or spray or
anything else on my forearms or on my elbows. Areas that I may have missed.
This is also a good time to double check to make sure we didn't get any
punctures from sharp objects. And then, after we're done
washing our hands and rinsing them per the recommendations,
we're gonna move over to the hand towel. Now again
there are these different devices nowadays that are motion-sensitive.
And if that's the case, of course we're not gonna touch anything that we don't
have to touch.
But in this case it is lever activated so we're gonna go ahead and get an
adequate amount of paper towel.
We're gonna thoroughly dry our hands, and our forearms, or any areas that we've washed
and then we're also going to use this same paper towel or towel
to reach over and turn off the sink. And now with the paper towel were simply
gonna turn off the faucet
and then throw the hand towel away in the trash receptacle.
If there's any contamination around the sink again that's going to get back to
more of the
the work practice and engineering controls, where we should be regularly
decontaminating those surfaces
anyways, along with watches are other contaminated devices
that need to be cleaned up as well, following the regulatory protocol.