New CDC Hand-Hygiene Guidelines:
In an effort to boost healthcare worker attention to hand hygiene, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released its Guideline for Hand Hygiene for Healthcare Settings.  The Guideline is relevant to all sectors of healthcare, including the rapidly expanding long term care (LTC) industry. The CDC Guideline makes it clear that healthcare organizations must permanently change the culture of handwashing to improve and to sustain adherence with recommended hand-hygiene practices.  The most striking CDC recommendations relate to the agents individual caregivers should use to decontaminate their hands, and the overall nature and scope of an organization’s hand-hygiene compliance program.

The CDC recommends:

•  “Point-of-need” alcohol handrubs become the preferred method of hand cleansing, as these agents have been found to be a time-saving tool for hand decontamination. The CDC warns that “Making an alcohol-based handrub available to personnel without ongoing educational and motivational activities may not result in long-lasting improvement in hand-hygiene practices.”
•  Organizations should implement a comprehensive, multi-modal hand-hygiene education and compliance program in order to overcome all of the known obstacles to hand-hygiene adherence.  The Guideline states: “Long-term, multi-modal, multi disciplinary programs that address individual and institutional barriers are necessary to achieve enduring improvements in hand-hygiene adherence.”

To purchase Alco Scrub, please click onto “Soaps, Sterilizing & Disinfecting Products” on our website.

For more information, please log onto the CDC website.

Now that we are in the midst of the needlestick regulations, we see how easy it is to comply with this law.  It was a little bumpy at first, but with a little bit of practice, it’s like we’ve been using these safety products all along!

Remember that citations and monetary fines can be issued for failure to:

• Have an Exposure Control Plan
• Follow universal precautions
• Review and implement commercially available "safer medical devices"
• Include procedures for documenting exposure incidents
• Review and update Exposure Control Plan at least annually
• Comply with most current CDC recommendations for post-exposure evaluation and follow-up.

See our links to important websites for more information.