Strategic PlanReminder: If you have questions, you may choose to discuss your selected strategic plan issue with your Instructor prior to submitting the required Assessments for this Competency.Click

Hand hygiene is important for infection prevention, patients’ safety, and the delivery of quality care. It must be performed before entering the patients’ zone, before performing an aseptic task, after risk of body fluid exposure, after patients’ contact, after contacting patients’ surrounding, and leaving patients’ zone.

Strengths: By following these recommendations, infection will be significantly reduced in the healthcare settings. Staff motivation to implement hand washing. Rely on evidence based practice. Improve outcome.

Weakness: Hand Hygiene products are not available at the point of care. A survey conducted on US and Canadian care workers indicated that 22.5% of US hospitals do not have alcohol-based hand rubs (ABHRs) available at the point of care (Kirk, Kendall, Marx, Pincock, Young, Hughes, &Landers, 2016). Difficulty to measure adherence to hand hygiene (Joint Commission, 2017). Staff are too busy to think about hand washing

Opportunities: Staff and family education, conduct audit, constant reminder, frequent check of hand hygiene products at the point of care and make them available. Decrease nurses or CNA patient ratio so they can have enough time to think about hand hygiene.

Threats. Financial issues. Hand hygiene products can be costly to make them available for the staff, family, and visitors.