ALERT: Tell Hospitals to Come Clean
From Consumers Union:
Next week (October 14-20) is Hospital Infection Prevention Week and the first line of defense against hospital-acquired infections is clean hands.
Please take a few minutes this week to ask your local hospital to come clean. Ask them to tell the community how they comply with one of the easiest and most effective ways to prevent hospital infections: hand washing.
Just because hand washing is easy, doesn't mean they are doing it:
- Nearly 2 million patients get an infection while hospitalized every year and almost 100,000 of them die; the cost of their hospital care alone is around $27.5 billion.
- We know cleaning hands is a key factor in reducing infections; yet studies consistently reveal that hand washing compliance rates in hospitals are generally around 50 percent.
We need your help to get your local hospitals' hand hygiene compliance rate released to the public.
For the past several years, many hospitals have launched hand hygiene campaigns and made effective alcohol-based cleansers available throughout the hospital. But we have no idea if these efforts have actually led to improved hand cleaning.
Take a minute to help make Hospital Infection Prevention Week successful, click here for two ways to ask your hospital to release its hand washing compliance rate.
