WHO 5 MOMENTS FOR HAND HYGIENE AUDIT
The World Health Organisation (WHO) 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene is designed to promote understanding of the times when Healthcare Workers need to clean their hands:
The 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene
- Before touching the patient
- Before a clean or aseptic procedure
- After bodily fluid exposure risk
- After touching the patient
- After touching patient surroundings
Each moment is targeted at the moments in the healthcare worker’s interaction with patients and the patient care environment that increase the risk of spread of organisms and so is designed to:
✔ Reduce the risk of spreading organisms
✔ Reduce risk of healthcare associated infection (HCAI)
✔ Reduce the Risk of Sepsis.
Hand Hygiene Audit Software from Medical Audits
Our Hand Hygiene Audit System has been developed in liaison with Infection Prevention Specialists to support the implementation of the 5 moments for hand hygiene.
This mobile, paperless hand hygiene audit tool is compatible with the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) 5 moments audit tool and results can be benchmarked with any other healthcare facility in any other country using the WHO 5 moments paper based audit tool.
Observational Audit of Hand Hygiene Compliance
Auditing compliance with the 5 moments is time-consuming and requires the physical presence of an auditor in the clinical area, observing healthcare workers of all grades as they interact with patients and with the patient’s environment.
Numerous researchers have examined the impact of auditing on practice and there are many who say that observational audit will never provide data that reflects REAL practice due to the Hawthorne effect – That is, simply, that we are more likely to be on our best behaviour when someone is watching that when someone is not !!
So why carry out observational audits of Hand Hygiene?
We must not lose sight of the fact that we audit to improve compliance
Many healthcare workers do not truly understand how to apply the 5 moments for hand hygiene in clinical practice and so we audit to identify areas of practice that require improvement.
We can then provide training and support to healthcare workers so they understand why they missed a moment for hand hygiene and can then improve their practice.
Medical Audits Hand Hygiene Audit Tool
Medical Audits Hand Hygiene Audit Tool has been specifically designed for mobile auditing and specifically designed to help auditors provide real-time feedback during audits.
Some of the key features of this hand hygiene audit tool include:
- Simple, easy to use, user interface
- Audit healthcare workers by healthcare worker group
- Real time results for immediate feedback
- Detailed analysis reports
- Trend reports
- Audit multiple healthcare workers at the same time
Medical Audits Hand Hygiene Audit System Compatibility
Our hand hygiene audit tool can be used to replace the following paper based hand hygiene audit tools :
- WHO 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene audit tool
- Saving Lives Hand hygiene audit tool
- NHS Scotland Hand Hygiene audit tool
- Health Protection and Surveillance Centre (HPSC) hand hygiene audit tool