Hand Hygiene
Cleaning your hands with soap and water or hand sanitizer is the best way to prevent infections. Good hand hygiene is important to keep from spreading germs to sick and vulnerable patients. At Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, our care team members are committed to having clean hands. We follow the World Health Organization “Moments of Hand Hygiene” guidance, which lists when hand hygiene should be done:
- Before touching the patient
- Before a procedure
- After body fluid exposure risk
- After touching the patient
- After touching areas around the patient
How Are We Doing?
We check how well our team follows hand hygiene rules in inpatient units and ambulatory clinics. On each inpatient unit, there are people who watch and give feedback on hand hygiene. In our ambulatory clinics, we ask families to fill out a quick online survey. It helps us find out if our team members did well with hand hygiene during their visit.
Our team consistently performs hand hygiene more than 90% of the time. This data also gives us information when we need to make improvements. The graph below shows our hand hygiene compliance rate, which means what percentage of the time our providers were observed washing their hands.
What You Can Do to Help
We welcome our patients and families to speak up and remind our team members to wash their hands as needed. In ambulatory clinics, please fill out our hand hygiene surveys to tell us how our team members did with hand hygiene during your visit.