Resource Allocation Can Be Guided by Intervention Modeling of Hand Hygiene, Environmental Cleaning

By Kelly M. Pyrek

If having limited resources at your healthcare institution is forcing you to choose one key infection control-related intervention -- either hand hygiene or environmental hygiene -- to get the most return on investment, what would you select? Researchers have developed a model that can help infection preventionists, healthcare epidemiologists and administrators determine which strategies have a better pay-off from a patient safety perspective and can help guide resource-allocation decisions.

As Barnes, et al. (2014) acknowledge, "Hospitalized patients are at risk for acquiring MDROs primarily from the hands of transiently colonized healthcare workers or indirectly from contaminated environmental surfaces. Hand hygiene has long been considered the central tenet of infection prevention aimed at limiting the spread of MDROs as well as susceptible pathogens. More recently, potential pathogens have been found to contaminate the near-patient environment, and environmental contamination has been linked to transmission from one patient to another. Infection prevention strategies to improve hand hygiene compliance and environmental cleaning in the healthcare setting are aimed at reducing this risk of transmission. However, despite knowledge of the importance of these strategies, compliance is notoriously poor … Significant efforts and resources are required to improve compliance in either of these areas, as they both rely on sustained change of behaviors among healthcare personnel. When healthcare facilities are investing limited resources in infection prevention strategies, it would be useful to know which strategy is likely to have the greater impact on preventing transmission; however, the relative impact of each of these strategies is unknown."

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