Hand washing for health-care workers in domestic care settings

Hand washing is recognized as the single most important practice in reducing the spread of infection. Infection problems, such as an increase in antibiotic resistant organisms, have now made apparent the need to return to such basic practice. Although optimum facilities and practices for hand washing in an inpatient setting have been described, these are rarely available for health-care workers providing increasingly more complex care to patients and clients in their own homes. Therefore community staff need to adopt a risk assessment approach and strategies to ensure that adequate decontamination of their hands is achieved in order that care can be given with the minimal risk of cross-infection between patients, clients and staff.