What is it about?
A hospital medication chart requires a nurse to document the date, time, route and dosage of the medication given to a patient. This step ensures that the patient receives the correct medication in a safe manner and that this is recorded. The completion of the specified requirements on the hospital medication chart is mandatory for nurses, but it does not currently feature a hand hygiene step.
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Why is it important?
It is estimated that the NHS spends over £1 billion each year treating healthcare-associated infections, to which approximately 500 deaths each year are directly attributable (Cresswell and Monrouxe, 2018). This is in spite of clear evidence that good hand hygiene compliance in clinical settings prevents the spread of such infections. At an individual level this proposal may be perceived to produce only marginal gains, but at a system level the preventative effect against healthcare-associated infections could be significant. It may also have wider benefits, as it recognises the power of behaviour and the formation of habits.
Perspectives
From a design thinking perspective, the proposal of adding a hand hygiene tick box to the hospital medication chart is a low-tech idea that could easily be prototyped. If successful, it would also be simple to scale-up. Alternatively, prototyping may yield new insights into how to improve hand hygiene compliance among nurses more broadly.
charles smith
Victoria University of Wellington
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Behavioural science and design thinking: re-framing the hospital medication chart to improve hand hygiene compliance in nurses, British Journal of Healthcare Management, February 2020, Mark Allen Group,
DOI: 10.12968/bjhc.2019.0120.
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