Running head: EFFECTIVE HAND HYGIENE WITH ALCOHOL OR SOAP AND

Effective hand hygiene with alcohol or soap and water

Effective hand hygiene with alcohol or soap and water Introduction Evidence based practice is essential to deciding what is the most effective way to acquire effective hand hygiene. Evidence based practice integrates previous research that is consistently proving the same thing to be true to provide a basis for implementing a new policy or guideline. The more evidence available on a subject the easier it is to gain support for the subject. Research has to be done frequently to reevaluate the way our hospitals can improve their patient care and hand hygiene is priority because it is the first line of defense to prevent the spread of infection. It is questionable which type of hand soap is considered to be more effective. In conducting my research I was not surprised to find out that most research was in support of using alcohol based foams and gels over soap and water. According to Picheansathian, “Results of this systemic review supported that alcohol-based hand rubbing removes microorganisms effectively, requires less time and irritates hands less often than does handwashing with soap or other antiseptic agents and water” (p. 3). The use of the IOWA model to guide this research proves compliant. Researching hand hygiene would definitely be positive for all three of the decision points which are outlined in the IOWA model. Most hospitals are always finding ways to improve infection control and so hand hygiene would be considered a priority for research. It has been deemed necessary to decipher the best way to promote effective hand hygiene and the research base is vast. This would indicate the need to proceed with the research. Hand hygiene would be very easy to adapt in clinical practice if the evidence based research should imply a need for a change. It is definitely easy to provide evidence of a problem and thus the need to provide an improvement in practice is necessary. Once evidence is developed and a change is indicated then it will me implemented and studied for further adaptations. The health care field is always evolving. The topic of hand hygiene is very important in medical surgical nursing because all patients deserve the right to lower risk of infection transmission while in the hospital. Hand hygiene is the basis of infection control and is of great importance to a medical surgical floor or to any floor in the hospital. “Therefore, hand hygiene is considered one of the most important measures for preventing nosocomial infections”(Picheansathian, 2003, p. 3). It is essential to research what the best method of hand hygiene really is for patient safety. When I started my research I searched with the search enginge, Google and I entered the words, “guideline for hand hygiene in health care settings” and I was sent to several different links to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) publications. This led me to believe that this topic is and has been widely researched. I also found it interesting that one of the sponsors of the site that was using quotes from the CDC was the 3M Health Care company. This was interesting to me because they are in production of health care products. The 3M information also agreed with my findings that alcohol-based scrubs are more effective than are just soap and water. In doing my research on the databases I used the terms hand washing and soap and water or alcohol. I usually was sent to the same list of retrievals, but if I tried to just search alcohol soaps it sent me to things having to do with drinking alcohol. All three databases I searched sent me to the same articles except for the Healthsource database which included a lot of environmental health issues not pertinent to the hospital setting.

Literature Review With all of my research I have gathered I have reached the