(Oak Brook Terrace, IL – May 1, 2012) The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare has expanded its Hand Hygiene Project beyond the United States to include nine Joint Commission International–accredited organizations in Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.
The Hand Hygiene project was launched in 2009 in the United States. Eight leading health care organizations collaborated by using the data-driven problem solving methodologies to identify organization specific factors that contribute to hand hygiene non-compliance. Since no two health care organizations are identical in their compliance failures, the health care organizations did not implement a bundle of solutions; instead they targeted their improvement solutions to the organization's unique list of validated contributing factors. Findings and methods used were validated in 27 pilot sites before these were incorporated into the Targeted Solutions Tool™ (TST) by the Center. The TST provides the foundation and framework of an improvement method that, if implemented well, will improve an organization's hand hygiene compliance and contribute substantially to its efforts to reduce the frequency of health care-associated infections. The data-driven tool provides validated and customized solutions to address an organization's particular barriers to excellent performance. Self paced and confidential, the TST offers instantaneous data analysis.
International pilot health care organizations were chosen using a variety of criteria, including the following:
•Creating a diverse consortium of organizations that represents all types of organizations JCI accredits
•Representation in all regions in which JCI accredits
•Organization size and scope of services
•Organizational motivation for and commitment to participation
The health care organizations are as follows:
•National Centre for Cancer Care and Research, Doha, Qatar
•Azienda Ospedaliero Universitaria (S Maria della Misericordia) di Udine, Udine, Italy
•Institute Jantung Negara (National Heart Institute), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
•King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
•King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
•Premier Jatinegara Hospital, Jakarta, Indonesia
•The Medical City, Pasig City, Philippines
•Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, Abu Dhabi, UAE
•UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Starting in April 2012, the international pilot organizations will start using the Hand Hygiene TST to measure and improve their hand hygiene compliance. The intent of this effort is pilot testing the feasibility and content applicability in international settings and regions that may bring new factors and learning, there is no future targeted date currently set for broad availability of the Targeted Solutions Tool beyond this initial pilot group.
One of the hallmarks of the project methodology is the rigor of measurement system that more thoroughly and accurately measures hand hygiene compliance. After implementing this measurement system, almost universally, health care organizations are surprised to learn that their baseline rate is dramatically lower than their previous measurement had indicated. In the United States, this has been true for very well known and respected institutions as well as smaller, community based health care organizations.
After over 500,000 observations collected and reported in the Targeted Solutions Tool since its release in September 2010, health care organizations are averaging a baseline of 50 percent compliance. After targeting causes the tool helps identify, they've been able to increase their compliance rates almost 50 percent to an average of 74 percent compliance as of February 2012. Several organizations have also reported positive impacts on their HAI rates crediting their improvement in hand hygiene compliance as a key factor.
"These health care organizations have the courage to step forward to tackle the problem of hand washing by digging deep to find out where the breakdowns take place so we can create targeted solutions that will work now and keep working in the future," says Mark R. Chassin, MD, MPP, MPH, president, The Joint Commission. "A comprehensive approach is the only solution to preventing bad patient outcomes. Consistent excellence in hand hygiene is vital to our larger aim of eliminating preventable health care-associated infections. The TST provides hospitals with powerful new knowledge and methods they can use right away to make substantial advances toward this goal."