If your doctor or nurse seems to be humming “Happy Birthday to You,” it’s probably a way of timing the washing of hands. Fifteen seconds is the proper minimum in a growing campaign to combat hospital-related infection.
Health authorities call hand washing the most important way to attack the critical problem of staphylococcic, bloodstream and other infections that patients can pick up while hospitalized for other ailments. More than 2 million patients get them and 90,000 die from them each year, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One patient in 20 gets one of these accidental infections.
A recent incident at a local hospital shows the seriousness of the problem. A patient with a history of pneumonia began a coughing spell and went to the emergency room. After various tests, a doctor diagnosed bronchitis but not pneumonia —“yet.” The doctor said the ordinary treatment would be to admit the patient to the hospital for a few days to make sure that pneumonia didn’t set in. But he advised, instead, that the patient go home and continue taking antibiotic pills for 10 days. He said staying in the hospital would risk contracting some other infection, which might be even more serious.
Emphasis on hand washing is nothing new. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes, a medical doctor although better known as an essayist, wrote that childbirth fever was spread by the hands of health care workers. Authorities have been refining and promoting hand-washing methods ever since.
The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., reported this year that a test of an alcohol-based personal sanitizer dispenser showed a reduction of 63 percent to 72 percent in various types of infection in an intensive care unit. The device could be pinned to a health care worker’s gown for frequent use on the job.
Still, there are complications. Plain soap and water may sometimes be more effective than alcohol, which doesn’t affect the spores of fungus diseases. And Scientific American magazine has warned that the popular antibacterial cleansers actually can promote the growth of new bacteria that resist antibiotics.
Most Maine hospitals are taking part in a standardized hand-washing and infection reporting system that soon will begin. The idea is to enable the hospitals to compare their records with one another and share knowledge of what works best.
For all the effort and improved guidelines, hand-washing in most hospitals is far from what it should be, say the CDC and other experts. One Maine authority puts compliance at 20 percent to 30 percent.
So, when asked whether a patient should remind a doctor or nurse to wash his or her hands, Sister Mary Norberta, president and chief executive officer of St. Joseph Hospital, says, “Absolutely.” And she urges parents to wash their hands frequently and teach their children to do the same.
Singing “Happy Birthday to You” can help them to do it right.