However, research from NICE suggests that hand hygiene is not always practised effectively, proven through research carried out, due to the pressures of high workloads and limited staff or availability of hand washing facilities. NICE guidelines state that within an organisation it is the service providers responsibility to ensure that alcohol rub, and hand washing facilities are always available for staff to decontaminate their hands. However, it has been proven that up to 89% of staff do not always carry out the correct hand washing technique, missing parts of the hand surface out even though they have the correct facilities. Using...
However, research from NICE suggests that hand hygiene is not always practised effectively, proven through research carried out, due to the pressures of high workloads and limited staff or availability of hand washing facilities. NICE guidelines state that within an organisation it is the service providers responsibility to ensure that alcohol rub, and hand washing facilities are always available for staff to decontaminate their hands. However, it has been proven that up to 89% of staff do not always carry out the correct hand washing technique, missing parts of the hand surface out even though they have the correct facilities. Using this quantitative research these statistics demonstrate the importance of nurses having the knowledge and understanding of the number of implications that ineffective hand hygiene has on person-centred care if it is not adhered to correctly. NICE guidelines suggest that although the hand hygiene procedure has improved over the years with more research and evidence to support the procedure, there are still misconceptions and effective practise is still not used universally. There is also qualitative research which explored people’s beliefs and conceptions on hand hygiene focusing on situations rather than behaviours of staff to gather findings on why health care workers act in certain ways and why staff do not fully comply with hand hygiene. Staff may not be fully complaint with hand hygiene if they use alcohol hand gel instead of the hand washing technique. This is due to alcohol hand gel been proven to be effective in physically cleaning the hands however alcohol gel is not as effective with soiled hands and against some organisms such as the removal of clostridium difficile spores. The local policy has supported that the use of alcohol hand gel is available to disinfect visibly clean hand and to compliment hands once hand hygiene has been practised.
