Hand hygiene in the workplace is crucial in the prevention of deadly illnesses. In order to encourage hand hygiene compliance among workers, managers must get more and more creative as the years pass. Studies have shown that educating employers on the importance of hand hygiene in the workplace works – in the short term. In the long run, employees have a hard time tracking the number of times they’d washed their hands throughout the day and tend to exaggerate the number, according to hand swabs taken in different studies. Employees also have a tendency to consider themselves as overly knowledgeable in the subject of hand hygiene, resulting in complacence and disregard for hand washing.
The CDC wrote, ” Practicing hand hygiene is a simple yet effective way to prevent infections. … On average, healthcare providers clean their hands less than half of the times they should. On any given day, about one in 31 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection.”
The habit of washing hands is indeed one that is hard to implement in any workplace, much as it is needed. In this article, we hope to give you important information that will help you succeed in making your workplace a safer and more hygienic environment for yourself, your employees, and ultimately, your customers.
Why is it important to monitor hand hygiene rates in the workplace?
There are a few important reasons to monitor hand hygiene practices in the workplace. For one, it is an incentive for performance improvement among workers. Answering to their superiors about the number of times they’d washed their hands, as well as the quality of the wash cycle, encourages employees to do a better job. Monitoring hand hygiene also helps when conducting an outbreak investigation if one is ever needed. Monitoring hand hygiene rates also helps system monitoring, staffing management, and infrastructure design.
What influences hand hygiene performance?
A number of things influence the performance itself of proper hand hygiene among workers. Studies have shown that in the short term workers who are more knowledgeable of the importance of hand hygiene practice it more. In the long run, the importance of the information fades and turns into overconfidence among employees, who neglect to wash their hands.
Structural aspects of the workplace play a big role as well. Studies confirm that employees in the food industry wash their hands more frequently when there is more than one sink available and when said sink is in their line of view. This means that hand hygiene products must be available to workers at crucial points in the workplace.
How is hand hygiene compliance rate calculated?
To answer this question, we must first answer another: when is it needed to wash your hands? According to different models of hand transmission, the opportune time for hand hygiene (AKA “the opportunity”) is from the moment hands touch an infected surface and before the time they touch a receptor surface, which would lead to contaminating it.
Hand hygiene compliance rate is usually decided by calculating the number of hand hygiene actions performed upon opportunity, divided by the total number of opportunities.
Soapy’s solution – the CleanMachine
Soapy’s CEO, Max Simonovsky, wanted to address many of the hand hygiene and infection prevention issues troubling workplaces when inventing the CleanMachine.
The CleanMachineuses AI technology to scan the hands throughout the wash and show which movements should be practiced to scrub and lather all areas of the skin as one washes their hands. It also provides the exact amount of water and soap needed for every wash cycle, saving facilities soap, water, and electricity. The CleanMachine has a facial recognition feature, allowing managers to both individual and group user data on the Soapy Wisdom platform. The smart machine is very simple to install, needing only a water inlet and outlet, a regular electricity connection, and a local Wi-Fi network. Soapy is the smart mindful way to wash hands.
Soapy answers pressing issues like encouraging performance improvement in hand hygiene among workers. It also constitutes a structural change that allows workers quality hand hygiene solutions that are highly available in the workplace.
If you’re interested in learning more about the CleanMachine, you can contact us here.
