Hand hygiene is considered to be the utmost significant aspects of infection management intervention. With increasing healthcare-related infections burden, healthcare practitioners are looking back to consider infection prevention basics by simple interventions like hand hygiene (Goodman & Spry, 2016). Sufficient scientific evidence supports that hand hygiene can substantially minimize the cross-transmission of infection risk in healthcare centers. Nonetheless, planning needs to be done for hand hygiene surgical intervention in order to ensure that all health practitioners observe the guidelines set. Therefore, this paper is an integrated intervention plan to ensure that all OR employees observe and follow hand hygiene guidelines before surgery.
To establish a successful hand hygiene intervention plan, a task panel has to be formed to do more research and observation into behavioral determinants, precisely to determine ways these determinants can be exploited for improvement of ensuring hand hygiene before surgery (Derde, Tomič, & Muzlovič, 2013). Process indicators are essential and getting to understand why some interventions are successful while some fail is required. Because of the behavioral nature of hand hygiene, the initial phase is intervention set up planning in order to find out the pervasiveness of risk behaviors such as non-adherence and the risk behaviors variation. In this step, a planning task is presented in the health facility, whereby participants have to make observations and elaborate with regards to their day-to-day life activities the three action plans that is; where, how often, how and when cleaning of hands is done. They also have to specify their copying plans to hand hygiene in the event that they encounter challenges in ensuring hygiene.
The next step is the document the observation noted on how OR employees in the health facility observe hand hygiene. Data gathered during the observation are assessed and thus helps hospitals in determining appropriate actions to take improve hand hygiene (World Health Organization, 2009). At this point, the based on the information gathered, it will be necessary to transform the static documented information into a vital and influential tool which will have an impact on the target health practitioners.
Next is to train and educate the health practitioners on how to observe hygiene and abide by the hand hygiene standards. In order to improve compliance of hand hygiene guidelines, this training education programs should focus on influencing the behavior and not only on the kind of hand hygiene products (Goodman & Spry, 2016). Ensure that healthcare practitioners are educated on the type of patient care can lead to hand contamination as well as the pros and cons of various ways of cleaning hands. Moreover, train healthcare practitioners carrying out surgeries on how to monitor their level of adherence to the recommended hand hygiene practices while offering them performance feedback. Also, to promote hand hygiene compliance in the healthcare setting, involve relevant stakeholders by creating a partnership between health practitioners, patients and their families (Derde et al., 2013). It is appropriate too to provide further intervention in other to promote hand hygiene guideline adherence by the health practitioners by implementing a multifaceted, multimodal and multidisciplinary programme which is structured for the improvement of compliance of the health practitioners to the endorsed hand hygiene practices.
In essence, having a proper hand hygiene intervention plan is essential in promoting adherence to the endorsed hand hygiene practices. It is clear that planning helps in identifying the key issues in hand hygiene, weakness in compliance with the guidelines and as well provides alternative recommendations to improve hand hygiene compliance. This plan, therefore, is vital in minimizing the burden of healthcare-related infections in surgeries.