Wash Your Hands? The Video is Watching
Those L.E.D. displays are very demanding — health care workers must clean their hands within 10 seconds of entering and exiting a patient’s room, or it doesn’t count. Three years ago, using the same criteria, the medical I.C.U.’s hand hygiene rate was appalling — it averaged 6.5 percent. But a video monitoring system that provides instant feedback on success has raised rates of hand-washing or use of alcohol rubs to over 80 percent, and kept them there.
Hospitals do impossible things like heart surgery on a fetus, but they are apparently stymied by the task of getting health care workers to wash their hands. Most hospitals report compliance of around 40 percent — and that’s using a far more lax measure than North Shore uses. I.C.U.’s, where health care workers are the most harried, usually have the lowest rates — between 30 and 40 percent. But these are the places where patients are the sickest and most endangered by infection.
When my father was in surgical ICU I don’t recall seeing any health care worker use the foam hand sanitizer.
This gives a whole new meaning to the concept of big brother.
Like speed cameras in my state, if the government starts operating hand washing cameras, it will quickly become an issue of revenue generation rather than cleanliness.
Cameras watching is a little too much supervision for my taste.
I don’t even think cameras are necessary. Using smart sensors at the sinks to determine the number of times healthcare workers are washing their hands is the way to go. The whole point must be to only account for a tabulation of the number of times workers collectively are washing their hands at the sink. The rate at which hands are being washed at the sink on a given day/hour should then be compared to how busy the clinic was on that particular day/hour.
The smart sensors, which should *not* be able to identify people, would serve the purpose of preventing infections and transmission of microbes. To make the system more effective, the smart sensors could be designed to go off and make an annoying beeping noise if the clinic has been particular busy and a disproportionately low amount of hands are being washed by the staff.
Seriously, my idea is genius.