Improving Family and Visitor Hand Hygiene in a Pediatric Tertiary Care Center

Abstract

Hand Hygiene (HH) is known to be the most effective way to prevent hospital associated infections. Since 2004, targeted education, hospital wide initiatives and other focused efforts have raised hand hygiene compliance rates in HCWs in our 250 bed inpatient pediatric tertiary care center to a sustained rate above 90%. However, family and visitor compliance rates have lagged. Review of hospital associated infections in our institution indicates that families and visitors can be an important source of infection transmission. Although families and visitors have been actively included in our past efforts to educate about the importance of HH, they have not been specifically targeted.