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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."
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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."
Then you should switch type/brands! The use of sanitizer instead of soap and water for dentists and doctors here in Sweden have dramatically decreased skin problems as hand sanitizer in most cases are better in preserving skin moisture than (even mild/re-hydrating) soap. Sure there are brands that doesn't contain re-hydrating compounds and sure there are people just not "compatible" with sanitizers but in general it's a win.
Well, that's great, apart from the fact that I can find only one source of that story (and a huge amount of forums linking to the same story).
I'll google it for you. Not even the Daily Mail has a story with that headline.
I get this kind of shit emailed to me every day from colleagues. I've debunked every single email that I get, and have now set up a rule that deletes any email from certain people that are sent to the office.
The one this morning that I heard about was "Nigel Farrage's - Tory party's worst nightmare". If the man has such great policies, why do his supporters need to attribute thirteen year old diatribes to him?
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.