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Hospital Resorts To Cameras To Ensure Employees Wash Hands
onehitwonder writes "Long Island's North Shore University Hospital is using sensors and video cameras to make sure employees wash their hands, according to an article in today's New York Times. Motion sensors detect when hospital staff enter an intensive care unit, and the sensors trigger a video camera. Feeds from the video camera are transmitted to India, where workers there check to make sure staff are washing their hands. The NYT article notes that hospital workers wash their hands as little as 30 percent of the time that they interact with patients. The Big Brother like system is intended to reduce transmission of infections as well as the costs associated with treating them."
Probably 20 years ago they werent expected to use hand sanitizers, but now they are.
In the environment that I work (a casino), there is frequent contact with chips, cards, and money that have been handled by large numbers of people over short periods of time so illnesses frequently spread. Of course its recommended that dealers and floor/pit men regularly use hand sanitizers throughout their shift, but if you've ever tried to regularly used hand sanitizer then you would know that you cant regularly used hand sanitizer without fucking up the skin on your hands.
"His name was James Damore."
Doctor's may be immune to discipline but nurses are not.
Nursing schools are cranking out young, low wage nurses, for which the hospitals are looking for any reason to get rid of the higher paid and older nurses... I know a nurse, she's in her 50s, been an RN all her life and still is forced to work x-mas and Thanksgiving otherwise her hospital will replace her with the girls coming out of the local nursing school.
Reminds me of the programming industry...
but if you've ever tried to regularly used hand sanitizer then you would know that you cant regularly used hand sanitizer without fucking up the skin on your hands.
I was about to say that. I know several doctors who work in hospitals and the skin of their hands is all dried and peeling off. They are the ones catching basic diseases because the skin of their hands has become too thin from all the washing. I think a future axis of research should be more about maintaining a healthy but innocuous surface bacterial flora. See what is going on right now with fecal transplants !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
So they don't trust their hospital staff to wash their hands, but they do trust Indian staff to report them.
As the article says - it is mostly about cognitive load. People focus on the hard things and forget the easy things. Checklists deal with exactly the same phenomena and have produced great results in healthcare as well as exactly the same bogus complaints about lack of trust.
The article points out that something like 100,000 deaths per year are due to infections acquired while the patient was in the hospital and dirty hands are the primary means of transmitting those infections between patients. This is a problem that absolutely must be fixed. simple "trust" has not been sufficient so far.
The indians who do the watching do not have any harder problems to distract them. They may grow bored, like anyone who has to watch the same thing over and over again, but that's manageable. Maybe they give the indians a bounty to encourage them to focus, maybe they just rotate them through other tasks frequently enough that boredom does not overwhelm them.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Alcohol is bad for the skin, while soap has proven to be just as effective at germ removal. So I'm fine with this monitoring if one of the options is to use regular soap. Otherwise they might as well add an injection station where you have to stab yourself with the medical elixir du jour before leaving the restroom.
I come here for the love
I can't stand the pillar the medical profession puts itself on. Let's run down the list of examples for how the medical profession doesn't give a shit about patients, shall we?
As a physician I'm quite interested in the subject. :-) Things have been bad in the past, but is getting better on all fronts. Let's take your issues one at a time:
There's a cap placed on residency hours per week and hours in a row, now. Yes, it's sometimes broken, but it's a lot better than 20 years ago. And, no, it's not routine practice to fake your timesheets. Or at least where I trained ~15 years ago, and not in the training program I assist overseeing. That being said, in some subspecialty fellowships I wouldn't doubt that it's more common to do this -- But they do this to gain more experience as you may only get a once in a decade experience if you stay on call and extra 2 hours. Who would deprive themselves that?
Penmanship is not taught in medical school. But electronic perscriptions are becoming more commonplace in the last few years (both on the outpatient and inpatient sides). And the last couple decades have brought on more responsibility of the patient to know what they are taking. The outpatient medication errors are the combined fault of the physician, the pharmacist, and the patient.
I wouldn't say that anyone routinely operates on the wrong body part. But mistakes do happen. It's now standard of care to do a "time out" with the patient, nurse, and physician all in the operating room to agree on the patient's name, date of birth, and procedure to be performed before any sedation is administered or incisions are performed. But I once had a patient respond to a different name who expected to have the same procedure performed. Fortunately he was tripped up by the date of birth.
As for washing hands, that's a culture change. My hospital has random people anonymously assigned to watch people enter and leave patient rooms to make sure we always wash in and out. (The people are people that work on the floors anyway.) A couple verbal warnings and suddenly everyone's compliant. No need for technology.
And the younger generation of physicians are more humble. But that's also because they tread medicine as more of a job and less of a calling. I guess you can't get everything. :-(
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Something is very wrong somewhere
First, in UK hospitals, the following happened ...
http://www.disclose.tv/forum/uk-allows-muslim-nurses-to-not-wash-to-protect-their-modest-t87289.html
Now, in US hospitals, they have to snoop on their staffs, and then send the video feed to India, where they got many pairs of cheap eyeballs to spot those who have failed to wash their hands
What has actually happened to common sense ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !