University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine - Partners in Your Care

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania developed Partners in Your Care, a groundbreaking program in which patients and providers work together to increase hand hygiene compliance.

Situation

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 2 million patients acquire infections in U.S. hospitals, resulting in 90,000 deaths annually. Experts agree that hand hygiene is the single most important factor in reducing hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). In fact, infection control programs that include hand hygiene compliance measurement programs can reduce HAIs by one-third. Yet many healthcare workers wash their hands less than 50 percent of the time between patient contacts.

Why? Because they forget, their hands are too sore from previous washings, or they mistakenly believe that gloves reduce the need for frequent hand washing.

Solution

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania developed Partners in Your Care, a groundbreaking program in which patients and providers work together to increase hand hygiene compliance. The program works by encouraging patients to ask their healthcare providers a simple but straightforward question:

“Did you wash or sanitize your hands?”

Upon being admitted to the hospital, the patient and family are provided an informational packet that discusses the program and invites them to become an active part of the healthcare team. The brochure outlines the importance of hand hygiene and explains how patient participation will help stop the spread of hospital-acquired infections.

In addition to educating and empowering patients, families, and healthcare workers, Partners in Your Care designates a hospital worker to monitor soap and hand-sanitizer usage. The worker forwards the information to the research team at University of Pennsylvania, where researchers produce a confidential report on their healthcare worker’s hand hygiene compliance rate. This report provides information that is recommended by the JCAHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations).

Partners in Your Care provides hospitals with a measurable, hand hygiene compliance program that requires no additional time, staff or costs, and has been shown in more than 300 hospitals to improve hand hygiene compliance by a mean of 59 percent.

Better Health & Lower Costs

According to research cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [1], hospital acquired infections increase healthcare costs by prolonging hospital stays, thus occupying scarce bed-days, requiring additional diagnostic and therapeutic interventions such as medications and dressings, and creating a greater workload for physicians and nurses.

If a 300 bed hospital with 10,000 admissions yearly had a 5 percent annual infection rate (500 infections) with costs of ($600 to $50,000) [2] depending on the type of infection, the total costs for these infections could be as high as $7.6 million. Reducing these infections by one-third through an infection control program including hand hygiene compliance measurement could result in 176 less infections and a cost savings to the hospital of $2.5 million.

[1] (Graves N. Economics and preventing hospital-acquired infection. Emerg Infect Dis [serial online] 2004 Apr [date cited]. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol10no4/02-0754.htm)

[2] CDC Office of Communication. Hospital infections cost U.S. billions of dollars annually. 2000 March