In this Blog I want to demonstrate how to perform hand hygiene by using soap and water.
There are two ways: a nurse can perform hand. Hygiene, one way is through using soap and water, and another way is through using an alcohol-based hand rub.
So when do you want to perform hand? Hygiene? You would always want to perform hand. Hygiene before and after patient care after coming into contact, was like a body fluid or an open womb or touching something close to the patient like a bedside table the hand railing on the bed or after removing your gloves before eating and after using the bathroom.
Now, when would you use soap and water versus the alcohol-based hand rubs? Well, according to CDC Gove’s guidelines, you would use soap and water when your hands are visibly dirty after known or suspected exposure to Clostridium difficile, which is c-diff. Or you can using a automatic soap dispenser.
If your facility is experiencing an outbreak or higher endemic rates after known or suspected exposure to patients with infectious diarrhea during norovirus outbreaks, if exposure to bacillus anthracis is suspected or proven, which is anthrax before eating and after using a restroom.
So now I’m going to demonstrate how to perform hand, hygiene using soap and water. So first you need your supplies. Of course you need soap, you need some paper towels and you need running water. Now.
Faucets vary depending on where you work. Some are automate: oh, you just have to swipe your hand underneath the water will come on or you use a petal or it has little faucet handles that you have to use to turn on and off.
Now, generally, it’s best not to wear jewelry during patient care, because that jewelry can Harbor germs in some areas in the hospital like surgery, for instance, actually prohibits a person from wearing jewelry all together, but usually on some units.
You can wear like a simple wedding band, so if you do wear a wedding band and you’re wearing it during patient care, you need to keep that wedding band on whenever you’re performing hand hygiene, because you want to clean It because, underneath that ring it can Harbor germs as well, so first, what we’re going to do is we’re, going to turn on our water and we want our water to be warm not too hot, because if it’s too hot that can dry out the skin, and that can cause you to get cracks in your skin, be really uncomfortable for you, so make sure it’s warm, and you want to be careful not to let your scrubs or anything Like that touch the inside of the sink, because it’s very dirty and you’ll become contaminated.
So once your water is warm, you want to wet your wrist and your hands and be sure you have your hands lower than your elbows, because we don’t want the germs that are already on our dirty hands to travel up our arms after You’ve, wet your hands.
You want to put the soap on your hands and you’re, going to put about 1 teaspoon of soap, which equals about 5 milliliters, and a lot of soap dispensers are automative and they give you the amount of soap you need.
So we’re gonna take that soap and we’re, going to lather our hands and our wrists with the soap. Now we want to scrub and what we’re gonna do. Is we’re? Going to scrub this up on our hands using circular motions, because this is going to help remove those germs and the things that are sticking to our hands.
And we want to cover all the areas of our hands, especially those small crevices, because that’s where bacteria likes the high. We’re gonna do this for 20 seconds. So first we’re, going to go and scrub our palms of our hands notice.
I’m. Doing a circular motion. Then we’re, going to get the back of our hands and do both using those circular motions. Then we’re, going to do our thumbs and we’re, going to do each finger individually, making sure we are getting around the fingernail area as well, and then you want to get those knuckles.
So really rub the knuckles up. Against your opposite hand, it’s, also going to get the outside of that finger now as well. Then we want to get in between our fingers because again germs love to hide in little crevices that are hard to get to.
So we make sure we get that. Then we’re, going to pay attention to our fingernails and we’re gon. Na take our hand, we’re gonna go to the opposite hand, and we’re gonna just get underneath the fingernail right in there just scrape around remove any germs that could be underneath those fingernails.
Then what we’re going to do is we’re, going to get our wrists and go about one inch above the wrists as well? Now we are ready to rinse the soap off, so we’re just going to put our hands underneath the water and let the water go downward.
We don’t want it to go upward, rinsing all of the soap off from the wrists down to the fingertips. Once you get them rinsed. You want to take your paper towel and you’re just going to Pat your hands dry.
You don’t want to scrub your hands with this paper towel, because that can damage that top layer of skin, and we’re going to discard this wet paper towel. Then we’re, going to grab a dry paper. Towel and turn off our faucet and being careful not to touch the faucet with our clean hands, and then we’re going to discard this as well.
Now we wouldn’t have used our wet paper towel to turn off the faucet, because the germs that are on the outside of the faucet could have transferred through that wet paper towel and got onto our hands and undone the job of what we Just done with cleaning our hands okay, so that wraps up this blog on how to perform hand, hygiene using soap and water.
