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."

Comments

Re:Groan

[JDG1980]

But... hang on a bit... how come 20 years ago this wasn't an issue?

Who says it wasn't?

Not well thought out

[girlintraining]

You're Cube Man #3,948 and every day, for 8 hours straight, you watch these TV feeds. It all looks the same. There is no audio. There is nothing interesting happened. Whenever you see someone wash their hands, you push a button.

Pop quiz: How long before you're bored senseless and start making mistakes... or not caring?

Psychology tells us that repetition and boredom leads to mistakes. This system is a band-aid, it does nothing to address the environmental conditions that are causing the behavior -- those are what need to be tweaked. You cannot make lasting changes to a person's behavior through threats, manipulation, guilt, and shame. Temporary, yes. But it wears off, and you're left with the situation of having to increase the level of abuse repeatedly, creating a vicious cycle that demoralizes people and makes them resentful.

Is that really the psychological state you want a guy whose job it is to cut people open and prescribe them powerful and potentially deadly medications? Come up with something better, people. This kind of social engineering has never been effective. The airline industry licked this problem a long time ago -- they're called checklists, copilots, training, and redesigning the environment and paying close attention to work loads. And the reason all of that was implimented is because the government got sick of corporations cutting corners on safety, training, and creating cultures of fear.

More people now die in hospitals than plane crashes. I think if government regulation of the industry worked to reduce the risk of flight to such a low level that it has become the safest mode of transport, that we can at least make our hospitals achieve half of that success. 30% is pretty damn pathetic, guys.

I loathe the medical "profession"

[SuperBanana]

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?

• We're forced to be seen by inexperienced, sleep-deprived, overburdened, overworked trainees. We don't allow truckers to drive more than X hours in Y days and the medical profession has proven lack of sleep impacts mental abilities. But med student hours? Sky's the limit, and it's common knowledge that you're supposed to fake your timesheets now that hospitals "track" this and have "policies."
• Medication errors cause 1.3 million injuries a year. Let's be clear here: Dr. I-Swore-An-Oath apparently can't be bothered to slow down and PRINT CLEARLY on your prescription form.
• Surgeons routinely fuck up "which leg" or "which eye." They're taught all sorts of anatomy, except they can't seem to figure out "left" versus "right"
• Despite the fact that hospitals are increasingly a cesspool of MRSA and other diseases, we continue to cling to the idea that we should treat people with transmissible diseases in close proximity to others, instead of having doctors travel to the sick patients, treat them, disinfect, and move on to the next patient. Gee, what could possibly go wrong with concentrating sick and weak people in one area?

Re:Groan

[JohhnyTHM]

Spot on. My wife has worked in a hospital for about 12 years. A couple of years ago they switched the sanitiser to a cheaper brand to save some money. After about 2 weeks so many staff were unable to work due to dry/cracked/bleeding/infected hands that the hospital had to hire agency staff to cover shifts. The cost of this and unions getting involved had the old sanitiser brought back in shortly after. They haven't tried swapping brands since then.