Best Children's Hospitals US News & World Report 2025-26
World's Best Specialized Hospitals Newsweek 2026

Why is hand hygiene important?

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are the most common adverse events in the healthcare setting. Reliability with hand hygiene is a simple yet important method for preventing transmission of organisms: from environment to person, and person to person. Preventing this transmission decreases the risk of patients acquiring an HAI.

We measure our reliability with hand hygiene for a number of reasons. Measuring in a standardized method allows us to determine if our performance requires improvement, to reduce our risk for patients potentially acquiring HAIs. Measuring reliability of hand hygiene also allows us to identify how improvement efforts are going. And finally, we measure to ensure that we are meeting regulatory requirements for patient safety.

How are we doing?

We monitor hand hygiene reliability by auditing opportunities based on the World Health Organization's (WHO) 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene. The graph below shows reliability with hand hygiene for the hospital on a quarterly basis. Our enterprise goal is to be 100 percent reliable with hand hygiene in all moments. As you can see in the graph, in 2023 our overall reliability was 92 percent through all locations with greater than 20,000 hand hygiene audits performed.

Hand hygiene compliance

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What are we doing to improve?

We continuously monitor our hand hygiene reliability and when opportunities for improvement are identified based upon trends, we utilize a standardized quality improvement process within a multidisciplinary team to increase reliability. The strategies for improvement focus on identifying barriers to staff reliability and solutions for removing the barriers. We provide feedback to departmental leaders on reliability within their areas on a regular schedule, and all staff have access to the unit reliability data. Additionally, we have a subject matter expert team to help us identify ways to continuously improve.

How do we compare to other hospitals?

Not all hospitals share their hand hygiene reliability data, so it's not possible to directly compare our rates with those of other children's hospitals, though the WHO reports on average without targeted interventions, hand hygiene reliability worldwide is estimated at 40 percent, and 60 percent specifically in intensive care units. Given these data, our continual monitoring of reliability and implementation of improvement strategies are demonstrating successes in our efforts, which are vital to keeping our patients safe.