It’s no secret that hand hygiene is one of the most important ways to prevent the spread of germs and keep yourself healthy. It’s so important that the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified five specific moments when it’s crucial to clean your hands. In this blog post, we will discuss 5 moments of hand hygiene, describe each of those moments, and provide tips on properly cleaning your hands during each one.
– Importance of Hand Hygiene
– How Germs Spread
– How to Wash Your Hands
– When to wash your hands
- When preparing food
- Before and after eating
- When sneezing or coughing
- After using the restroom
- After touching dirty objects
– 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene for Healthcare Workers
- Before touching a patient
- Before a clean/aseptic procedure
- After body fluid exposure risk
- After touching a patient
- After touching the patient surroundings
Importance of Hand Hygiene
One of the essential things you can do to help protect yourself and prevent and limit the spread of many infections is to wash your hands thoroughly. We need to perform hand hygiene practices to minimize the spread of illnesses such as the flu, food poisoning, and healthcare-associated diseases from person to person. Knowing ways how to improve hand hygiene compliance is indeed important.
How Germs Spread
How do germs spread? Germs can spread in many ways, including through the air, contact with surfaces, and people. Some of the most common ways that germs are spread include sneezing, coughing, and touching surfaces with germs.
Washing hands helps keep you healthy and prevents the transmission of respiratory and diarrheal illnesses from one person to the next.
Germs can spread from other individuals or surfaces when you do the following:
- Touch your eyes, nose, or mouth with unwashed hands.
- Prepare or consume food or beverages with dirty hands
- Make contact with a contaminated surface or things.
- Blow your nose, cough, or sneeze into your hands, then touch other people’s hands or common objects
When to Wash Your Hands
It is important to wash your hands regularly, but there are also certain times when it is especially crucial. Here are five moments when you should make sure to clean your hands:
When preparing food
Washing your hands is especially important when you are preparing food. When you are cooking, you may be handling raw meat, which can contain bacteria that make you sick. It is important to wash your hands thoroughly before and after handling food, especially raw meat.
Before and after eating
Washing your hands before and after eating is another important way to protect yourself from germs. Whatever you did today, your hands came into contact with germs. And that’s why it is so easy for germs on your hands to end up in your mouth.
When sneezing or coughing
It is important to take extra precautions to protect yourself and others when you are sick. One of the most important things you can do is wash your hands often; there is nothing wrong if you do it all the time. Germs can spread easily when sneezing or coughing, and washing your hands can help prevent them from spreading to other people.
After using the restroom
One of the most important times to wash your hands is after using the restroom. When you are done using the restroom, it is important to wash your hands thoroughly. This will help prevent you from getting sick and help protect others from getting sick.
After touching dirty objects
It is important to wash your hands after you have touched anything dirty, as this can help prevent the spread of germs. If you cannot wash your hands right away, you can use hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer will not eliminate all the germs on your hands, but it is better than nothing.
How to Wash your Hands
Washing your hands is one of the most important things you can do to protect yourself from germs. There are a few different ways to wash your hands, but the most important thing is to make sure you are thorough.
Here are the steps for washing your hands properly:
1. Wet your hands with warm water.
2. Add soap and lather your hands.
3. Rub your hands together for at least 20 seconds.
4. Rinse your hands thoroughly under warm, running water.
5. Dry your hands with a clean towel.
5 Moments for Hand Hygiene for Healthcare Workers
The hand hygiene approach defines one of the most important ways to prevent the spread of germs and illnesses in healthcare settings. There are five key moments when healthcare workers must clean their hands:
Before touching a patient
A healthcare worker must perform hand hygiene before contacting the patient or entering the patient zone to avoid colonization with healthcare-associated bacteria. The patient zone includes the patient and his or her immediate surroundings, such as surfaces touched by the patient (such as bed rails and infusion tubing) and surfaces often handled by personnel (such as monitors, knobs, and buttons).
Examples: Before shaking hands, assisting a patient to walk around, and doing a clinical examination.
Before a clean/aseptic procedure
Hand hygiene is crucial before performing a clean/aseptic technique to prevent healthcare-associated infections (HCAI.) Hand hygiene should be performed between the patient’s last exposure to a surface and immediately before accessing a critical site with infectious risk.
Examples include: before a wound dressing, catheter placement, meal preparation, and medicine administration.
After body fluid exposure risk
Hand hygiene must be performed immediately and before a new hand-to-surface exposure after completing an activity associated with a risk of exposing hands to bodily fluids, even if you remain inside the patient zone. This activity lowers your chances of becoming colonized or infected by infectious agents, as well as your chances of spreading germs from a “colonized” to a “clean” bodily spot within the same patient.
Examples include extracting and manipulating blood, cleaning up urine and excrement, and disposing garbage.
After touching a patient
Hand cleanliness is essential after touching the patient and before handling an object in the region outside of the patient to reduce the risk of transmission and uphold infection control in the healthcare environment, thus advocating patient safety. This action also protects you by preventing contamination of your hands with the patient’s body fluids.
Examples include shaking hands, assisting a patient in moving around, doing a clinical examination, and direct patient care.
After touching patient surroundings
The concluding hand hygiene moment occurs between hand exposure to a surface in the patient’s surroundings and subsequent hand exposure to materials near the patient – even without touching them. Hand hygiene is necessary because even without direct contact with the patients, exposure to patient items is linked with hand contamination.
Examples: changing bed linens, leaving the room with or without patient contact
Hand hygiene is incredibly important, both in our personal lives and the workplace. By taking a few minutes to clean our hands regularly, we can avoid spreading germs and illnesses. We hope you’ve found these tips helpful and that you will take the time to practice good hand hygiene every day. Please share this post with your friends and family members, so they can stay healthy too! And don’t forget to leave us a comment below, letting us know how you plan on incorporating hand hygiene into your daily routine.
References:
https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/when-how-handwashing.html
https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/hand-washing-and-hand-hygiene
https://www.tork.co.uk/hygiene/good-hygiene/tork-clean-care/healthcare/five-moments-of-hand-hygiene
https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/Documents/Programs/HAIP-AS/WHO%205%20Moments%20poster.pdf
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