Hand hygiene is the practice of cleaning one’s hands to reduce the spread of germs and prevent the transmission of infectious diseases. Germs such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi can easily be transferred from person to person through hand-to-hand contact, contaminated objects, or surfaces.

Proper hand hygiene can help to reduce the risk of infection and promote overall health and well-being. Hand hygiene is particularly important in healthcare settings, where healthcare workers are at a high risk of exposure to infectious diseases and can inadvertently spread germs to vulnerable patients. However, hand hygiene is also important in everyday life, such as before preparing food, after using the bathroom, and after being in public places. By practicing good hand hygiene, we can all play a role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases and maintaining a healthy environment.

Hand Hygiene

While working in the maternity wards around 1846, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss noticed that the mortality rates in the clinics cared for by medical students were considerably higher than in the clinics cared for by midwives and observed that these medical students were coming from performing autopsies in the morgue into the delivery rooms after washing their hands with only soap and water.

After he began requiring them to wash their hands with a chlorine solution before providing care, the mortality rates decreased from 10% to 1%. Around the same time in Boston, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes came to a similar conclusion and believed that disease-causing bacteria were being spread among patients at the hands of doctors.

Both Semmelweiss and Holmes were met with resistance from their colleagues but were eventually recognized for their work in hand hygiene.

We all have bacteria on our hands and are considered to be colonized with microorganisms such as coagulase-negative Staphylococcus, Corynebacterium species, and even fungi like Malassezia species, meaning that they are present but are not likely to cause disease.

However, since healthcare personnel is more likely to have direct contact with patients that are infected with pathogens associated with healthcare-acquired infections such as Staphylococcus aureus, Proteus mirabilis, Klebsiella species, and Acinetobacter species, they are more likely to be colonized with these pathogenic organisms.

Healthcare

Healthcare personnel is more likely to spread these pathogens to other patients who are immunocompromised and more likely to become sick and more susceptible to contracting a hospital-acquired infection if proper infection control practices are not followed.

It has been shown that nurses “could contaminate their hands with 100 to 1000 [colony forming units] of Klebsiella species during “clean” activities such as lifting patients, taking the patient’s pulse, blood pressure or oral temperature; or touching the patient’s hand, shoulder or groin.” Examples like that stress the importance of adhering to basic infection prevention practices.

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