New hygiene scheme for Nevill hall (From South Wales Argus)

New hygiene scheme for Nevill hall

2:42pm Sunday 28th December 2008

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INFECTION control nurses in Gwent are set to bring an award-winning hand hygiene project to the area's second biggest hospital, after a successful introduction at the Royal Gwent.

Staff on 27 wards at the Newport hospital are now taking part in the scheme, which includes intensive weekly hand hygiene monitoring, and collegues at Abergavenny's Nevill Hall Hospital will get involved early next year.

Staff on three wards at St Woolos Hospital, also in Newport, and on one ward at Caerphilly District Miners' Hospital, have been auditing their compliance too.

The aim is to achieve and maintain 95 per cent hand hygiene compliance, minimising the occasions on which such measures are not observed, and instilling such measures as a habit performed without even thinking about it.

And there is evidence that the work done on this project at the Royal Gwent is beginning to bring tangible results.

"Each ward has a member of staff to act as its 'champion' for this project. It is about staff doing this themselves, rather than have others imposing it on them," said nurse and patient safety co-ordinator Jan Barrett.

"Study days on this project have been very successful. It's about giving the staff the power and the knowledge to implement this themselves."

The project won an award earlier this year for Liz Waters - Gwent Healthcare Trust's lead nurse in infection control - and her team.

Colleague Moira Bevan said the battle against the likes of superbugs MRSA and Clostridium Difficile is ongoing.

"We appreciate we have more work to do and we cannot stand still with this. Continual improvement is being made by doctors and nurses on the wards and our job is to support that," she said.

The hand hygiene project was introduced through a UK-wide Safer Patient Initiative (SPI) and is now being merged into the nationwide 1,000 Lives Campaign, which aims to demonstrate that improvements in patient safety can produce tangible results in terms of preventing deaths.

Gwent Healthcare Trust recently scored four out of five in an audit among hospitals UK-wide that have been implementing the SPI hand hygiene programme.

"Experience shows that those at a score of four have started to see a real difference in areas such as mortality rates," said trust medical director Dr Grant Robinson.

MRSA incidence in Gwent hospitals has been among the lowest in the UK, well below the Welsh average, which is itself below the average for cases in English hospitals.

MRSA rates rose in Gwent hospitals earlier this year, but during the past two months there has been just one recorded case in the Royal Gwent, and trust bosses hope this is a sign of the hard work put in to establish the hand hygiene project.

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