Hand Hygiene

If you’re allergic to natural rubber latex, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has good news for you: in the future, you are less likely to be misinformed about the absence of this allergen in such products as medical devices. To avoid false assurances about this hazard, the FDA is recommending to manufacturers to stop using the labels “latex free” or “does not contain latex.” The reason for this recommendation is that the agency is not aware of any tests that can show a product contains no natural rubber latex proteins that can cause allergic reactions

Every healthcare organization need supplies and tools to achieve high quality care, but patient safety resources can be a difficult goal to plan into a hospital budget. Though we tend to think of a hospital as the place where patients find care rather than dangers, patients do face risks inherent to a caregiving facility. To ensure patient safety, hospitals often purchase these five must-have supplies, tools and resources:

There is “universal recognition” that hand hygiene practices reduce the spread of HAIs, notes nursing researcher Elizabeth McInnes, yet “healthcare workers’ compliance with best practice has been sub-optimal. Senior hospital managers have responsibilities for implementing pa-tient safety initiatives and are therefore ideally placed to provide suggestions for improving strategies to increase hand hygiene compliance.”

Remote video auditing (RVA) with feedback is a promising new technology shown to dramatically improve compliance among healthcare workers (HCWs). Emerging research suggests that the proven efficacy of these systems is associated with the real-time performance evaluation and reminders they provide to HCW, which encourages staff to improve or modify aspects of their behavior.