Patients Should Ask Their Doctors To Wash Their Hands

Are doctors practicing what they preach when it comes to hand hygiene? According to a new study, they might not be doing so, especially when they are not watched! 

A new study from the California-based Santa Clara Valley Medical Center highlighted a problem that patients should be aware of. Based on their findings, numerous healthcare specialists do not bother washing their hands as frequently as they should, HNGN reported. 

"The level of hand hygiene compliance when staff did not know they were being watched was surprising," said Maricris Niles, MA, infection prevention analyst, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, California.

"This study demonstrated to us that hand hygiene observations are influenced by the Hawthorne Effect and that unknown observers should be used to get the most accurate hand hygiene data," Niles added.

The President of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Susan Dolan, is naturally displeased. "Hand hygiene is one of the most important ways to prevent the spread of infection, and yet it can be one of the most difficult benchmarks to improve,"she said The findings are yet to printed at the association's yearly conference. 

The Associate Director for Science at the CDC, Dr. Clifford McDonald, the ideal number of times that healthcare people in the intensive care unit is roughly 100, in a shift of eight hours. 

Dr. McDonald claimed that one way to ensure doctors wash their hands is for their own patients to be constantly vigilant, no matter if this can be quite embarrassing to do. "If we can get the patients more involved in that -- and get them to be able to speak up, that is really the main thing," he said, as reported by ABC News Go. "A lot of patients are nervous about that kind of thing -- that's another culture we're trying to change."