Basic Hygiene - hugely important for all care actors
Heike Briesch, Chairwoman of the VHD (German Association for Hygiene Specialists) and member of KRINKO (the German Commission for Hospital Hygiene and Infection Prevention) will introduce the first module by giving an update on basic hygiene that prevents transmissible diseases from spreading and serves to protect patients and residents of care facilities as well as their workers and visitors. Briesch points out that hygiene and infection prevention are essential in ensuring patient safety. “Nosocomial infections don’t just affect patients that come to stay in a hospital for treatment. They also affect people that receive inpatient and outpatient care. This means that implementing hygiene measures is of the utmost importance for each patient or resident, regardless of whether we know their infection status or not, and basic hygiene plays an essential role here.”

Hand disinfection - a must for every situation

Hand disinfection is one of the most effective methods for preventing nosocomial infections and the transmission of multiple resistant pathogens, and we have known this for a long time. On the basis of the “Clean Care is Safer Care” campaign from the WHO, significant measures to improve hand disinfection have been implemented in inpatient and outpatient medical facilities within the scope of the Clean Hands Campaign. “We still need to improve compliance with hand disinfection standards” stated Dr Tobias Kramer MD, MSc (Infectious Diseases) and Antibiotic Stewardship Expert (for the German Association for Infectiology, the DGI). As a science expert working on the Clean Hands Campaign at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Kramer knows that these measures need to be supported by stakeholders at all levels if successful long-term implementation is to be ensured. “The influence and role-model potential that management-level employees can have, in particular, should not be underestimated. This potential should be used to its fullest extent”, stated Kramer. Which measures should implement to boost compliance further? Kramer thinks that we should generally be looking at tried and tested measures, such as those recommended in the Clean Hands Campaign. These include sharing knowledge, reports on observations on compliance and use of hand disinfection agents at all stations, memory aids and optimized dispenser location and fitting. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that having the station’s employees make their own commitment and having them establish targets to be attained can lead to a sustained improvement in behavior in terms of compliance with hand disinfection standards.

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