 |
Photo caption: Occupational therapist Laura Shapiro (left) and physiotherapist Rebecca Bunston (right) helped develop Tough Scrubber at St. Michael’s Hospital.
By the St. Michael’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Program’s Quality and Safety Leader Group
|
Fun, fast, challenging, hilarious. Is this how your staff would describe their hand-hygiene education? Try Tough Scrubber and they just might.
In the Heart and Vascular Program at St. Michael's Hospital, our traditional hand hygiene interventions were feeling a bit stale. Engagement was low – and honestly, it showed in our compliance rates.
We needed more than a poster. We needed a sensation! Enter
Tough Scrubber, the brainchild of our program's Quality and Safety Leader Group. A play on the
Tough Mudder concept, front-line staff go through a fast-paced, over-the-top simulation that's tailored for their clinical area. There's a quick quiz before they start and a quick debrief after they finish… and that's it. The whole process takes 10 minutes or less. We're happy to report, it was a huge hit!
This five-minute video will tell you more about how Tough Scrubber works. We've also put together a
toolkit to help hand-hygiene champions implement Tough Scrubber in their own hospitals and health-care organizations.
For us at St. Michael's, Tough Scrubber opened the door to a new way of thinking about hand hygiene. It's OK to ask questions and to give your colleagues feedback – we're all learning. Doing hand hygiene correctly can be tough, but it's much easier when we help each other out.
To date, 43 Heart and Vascular staff have completed Tough Scrubber, and our hope is that you will too. All it takes is our toolkit, 4-5 hand-hygiene leaders (to run the activity and pose as patients), an empty patient room with two beds, and the everyday equipment described in the scenarios (e.g. a wheelchair, a basin).
In our Heart and Vascular Units, we've improved our compliance rate for Moment 1 by 27% in three years. This is certainly the result of a combination of years of education, hard work and many different kinds of interventions. However our Tough Scrubber sessions truly felt like the tipping point.
For more information on Tough Scrubber and to download the toolkit, visit
www.stmichaelshospital.com/toughscrubber.
Try it, and let us know how it worked for you! If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us at
BunstonR@smh.ca and
ShapiroL@smh.ca.
