Hand hygiene may feel like a simple, barely consequential health practice. But it has the power to save lives — including in nursing homes, where infections are common.
New research from the American Journal of Infection Control — a journal of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology — shows that when nursing home staff, residents and visitors adopt consistent hand-hygiene protocols, these venues can actually reduce mortality and rates of antibiotic prescriptions, not to mention ensure more people use hand cleaners.
Researchers studied 26 French nursing homes between April 1, 2014 and April 1, 2015 — 13 in the intervention group and 13 in the control group. The hand-hygiene program the intervention group received included everything from access to hand-sanitizing solution via small containers and new dispensers to promotional posters to online quizzes after the program concluded.
The intervention group had a lower death rate: 2.10 deaths compared to 2.65 in the control group per 100 residents monthly. Regarding antibiotic prescription rates, the research found a need for 5 daily doses compared to 5.8 daily doses, respectively, per 100 resident days (i.e. the rate of dosage compared to 100 days). Antibiotic prescriptions fell in the spring and summer for both the intervention and control groups, and rose during the January to March 2015 period — when France faced a flu epidemic that hit older adults the most.
During this time, the researchers noted there was a 30 percent lower mortality rate in the intervention group.
The 30 percent figure surprised study author Laura Temime, a professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in France. She says the results suggested their efforts had effectively somehow controlled spread of the flu or flu-like epidemic. Temime adds, however, that after the intervention, there was somewhat of a catch-up regarding deaths.
“We stopped the residents from dying from the influenza epidemic but because they were basically old people with lots of morbidities, they still died afterwards, but they died later,” she says. They were able to increase life expectancy about three to six months, not a negligible number given the 18-month life expectancy in these types of nursing homes.
The takeaway? Hand-hygiene education could improve practices and limit infection.
“It is crucial that we increase efforts to bolster infection prevention programs in nursing homes because residents of these facilities have more underlying health conditions and are more vulnerable to serious complications from infections,” Janet Haas, president of the 2018 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, said in a statement.
Elsewhere in the world, hand-hygiene compliance for nursing home staff is quite low — just 17 percent in Italy, 14.7 percent in Canada and 11.3 percent in Taiwan.
There are some 3 million infections in U.S. nursing homes every year, which can lead to the majority of nursing home deaths (an estimated 0.6 deaths for every 1,000 resident days) and translate to as much as $1 billion in additional health care expenses.
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Better Hand-Hygiene Practices Could Mean Fewer Deaths in Nursing Homes originally appeared on usnews.com
