Hand hygiene lacking in Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region

Regina – Health care workers might not be practicing what they preach when it comes to hand washing.

Audits conducted in February and June reveal that only about 60 per cent of Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region staff properly sanitize their hands. A shockingly low 22 per cent of workers at the Regina Lutheran Home follow proper hand hygiene.

“Society takes a while for their behavior to change and I think we’re still in that place where we’re slowly incrementing but we’re not getting there nearly fast enough,” said Jason Tetro, a microbiologist from Toronto.

A couple of the wards with dismally low numbers include the Pasqua ICU where only 54 per cent of workers comply. In the labour and birth unit at the Regina General Hospital, only seven per cent have proper hand hygiene.

“Some say they don’t have the time to wash their hands. Some say that the product isn’t readily available to them. Some people say they just forget,” said Kateri Singer, an infection prevention and control specialist with RQHR. “The numbers are kind of a wake up call.”

The criteria is specific – health care providers need to wash their hands for 20 seconds before and after seeing a patient. They should not wear certain jewelry, nail polish or fake nails and wearing gloves is not good enough.

“There’s hand washing and then there’s proper hand washing and in terms of proper hand washing, we want to get that to 100 per cent,” said health minister Dustin Duncan.

RQHR acknowledges the numbers might not be completely accurate as workers could be more inclined to wash their hands properly when an auditor is standing in the room. Over the last few years, companies have been marketing electronic monitoring devices for hand washing.

“You tend to not only have more valid statistics, they’re more trustworthy, but you also get lots more numbers,” said Tetro.

Saskatchewan doesn’t currently have a provincial standard when it comes to monitoring hand washing; however Duncan said he’s not opposed to having that discussion.