Hospitals, health ministries and others have instituted numerous campaigns in recent years to get doctors and nurses to scrub up more often, while implementing monitoring programs and publicly releasing the results. Overall, the “covert” monitors found compliance was 50 per cent, compared to the official rate of 84 per cent. The Toronto hospitals are putting together a study of electronic monitoring, which would probably be used in addition to the human auditors, she said. Another striking finding was that hand washing by medical residents plummeted from 80 per cent to 19 per cent when the physician supervising them neglected to clean. Medical students in the study who secretly monitored hand cleaning found that just half of nurses and doctors at a major Toronto hospital soap up as required — far lower than the official rate divulged publicly.

Source: National Post July 12, 2016 15:56 UTC