Another use for the checklist

A press report from the Society of Critical Care Medicine Meeting outlines a study with a simple, novel intervention to improve hand hygiene compliance. In this study, investigators in a surgical/trauma ICU added a question to their daily care checklist: Has anyone seen anyone else touch the patient without washing their hands in the past 24 hours? If the answer is yes, the name of the offender is recorded. The result of this simple intervention was improved hand hygiene compliance from 69% to 89%. Though there isn't much detail about the study given in the report, one could envision how this would integrate front-line providers into a continuous vigilance that could be quite powerful. One downside is that this would likely not work well outside the critical care setting.