1. Only you can prevent the spread of disease.
Infection Control
Only you can prevent the spread of disease.

2. What are your MAIN responsibilities in disease control?
Wash Your Hands…A Lot!
Get Your Yearly TB test AND result checked by your nursing staff
Stay home if you’re sick

3. History of Hand Washing
In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes, a prominent New England physician conducted a survey strongly suggesting that childbed (puerperal) fever was a contagious disease caused by an infection passed to pregnant women by their doctors, who frequently moved from patient to patient, and even from autopsy to patient, without Washing their hands. He was derided by his colleagues. From their point of view, puerperal fever was caused by chance or God; no gentleman could have hands so dirty as to cause disease, and it was inconceivable that physicians could be responsible for the deaths of their own patients.
Later that same decade, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweiss, a physician working at the Vienna Medical School, bolstered the case for puerperal fever as a contagious disease. At the time, the Vienna Lying-In hospital had two maternity wards, one staffed by midwives, and the other by medical students supervised by staff physicians. The mortality rate among women attended by midwives was approximately 2-3%; however, the students’ ward had a rate of 10% or more. While hospital administrators blamed the high mortality rates on poverty, this could not explain the difference between the two wards. Instead, Semmelweiss believed that the students, who received much of their medical training in the autopsy room, were carrying infections from cadavers they dissected to the women in the ward. When students and physicians scrubbed their hands with chlorinated lime instead of washing with ordinary soap and water, mortality fell to the levels observed in the midwives’ ward. Semmelweis’s work is now recognized as a landmark in the history of medicine. But, as with Holmes, his conclusions were not accepted at the time, and physicians continued to ascribe puerperal fever to some constitutional predisposition on the part of the patients. After the death of Semmelweis, Joseph Lister published a series of studies of antisepsis, and Louis Pasteur identified the microbe associated with puerperal fever. With proof of the "germ" theory of disease, physicians acknowledged that germs could be passed from patient to patient, patient to doctor, and doctor to patient, and hand washing with antibacterial soaps was established as standard medical practice.

4. HAND WASHING STATS American Society of Microbiology studies showed:
Study of 305 Detroit students who washed four times a day:
24% fewer colds and 51% less stomach upset.
Minnesota daycare-teachers helped the kids wash their hands every morning when they arrived and the staff disinfected all area parents may have touched.
Result was 50% fewer illnesses at daycare.
Another Minnesota school has begun using foam soap.
Result is 75% increase in hand washing rates.
American Society of Microbiology studies showed:
97% of females and 92% of males say they wash after using the bathroom
of these only 75% females and 58% males washed

6. If you could see the germs, you’d wash your hands…

7. Blacklight on Germs: Where else are they hiding?

8. As Well As… Bottoms of Purses Cell Phones Keys Ties Money Pens
Door knobs
Etc…

9. So…You think you can Wash??

11. Yep, We’re going to say it AGAIN
When Do We Wash?
Before AND after eating

12. And…
After smoking

13. Also…
If you cough, sneeze or wipe your nose

14. AND OF COURSE…
After using the bathroom.

15. Goals for Hand Washing this year:
New signs in bathrooms as reminders to all
Staff will wash their hands at least four times at work.
Decrease in amount of preventable illness in our facilities.
Yearly training and reminders to all O.H.

16. Tuberculosis TB Tests are required each year for staff and residents.
You must come and get the test from Nursing staff and also get it checked two days later.

17. If you’re Sick….STAY HOME!!
Don’t be a Jerk!
You may justify your coming in by thinking you’re helping, when in reality, you’re exposing more people to your illness.
You’re potentially causing others to stay home because they’re sick.

18. RESIDENTS
If you see residents actively coughing, sneezing, or visibly ill, send them to nursing staff to be evaluated.

19. One Last thing…
Cough and sneeze into your sleeve, or preferably a tissue, followed by proper hand washing…