Patient Driven Hand Hygiene Auditing

There was a recognized need and desire at Western Health to engage patient partners in co-design of programs and services to enhance patient safety. Hand hygiene auditing practices are well established in acute and long-term care facilities at Western Health, however there was limited focus on hand hygiene auditing within community based and ambulatory care settings.

A patient driven hand hygiene auditing program was co-designed by Western Health staff and a patient partner to increase audit compliance and practice improvements at one of our community-based blood collection clinics. A key component of this program is that patients who visit the clinic are the observers and complete all the audits of hand hygiene compliance.