Your Handwashing Compliance Window

As a healthcare provider, your hand hygiene compliance is crucial. Vitalacy focuses on two key factors: the Room Visit Duration and Compliance Windows. This article will explain these factors and help you improve your hand hygiene practices. 

Compliance Window:

Infection prevention standards suggest that all patient care staff wash their hands before entering and after exiting a patient's room to be considered compliant. If you happen to forget to wash your hands, you still have a 60 second compliance window to wash to remain compliant.

For example, you can wash your hands in the nurse station and then you go directly to a patient room, as long as it takes place in 60 seconds. Or if you wash your hands inside the patient room and you exit and go straight into another patient room, as long as it is within 60 seconds you will still be compliant and won’t need to double wash.

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Pro Tip: If you wash your hands inside of a room before you exit, you wont need to double-wash upon entering another room. Do note, however, you cannot have multiple different room entries within 60 seconds. 

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Room Visit Duration: 

This feature allows your facility to designate how much time in a patient care area is considered an actual patient care visit. This feature will remove short room visits from your overall compliant score. The default duration is 10 seconds.

This means, if you visit a patient room under 10 seconds it will not count as a patient room visit, thus it will not count towards your compliance.

Examples include multiple room entries for restocking, brief check-ins, or repeated visits as part of your workflow (e.g., radiologists).

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Pro Tip: Each hospital system has different room visit duration timers. Default is 10 seconds however your facility admin can change the duration setting as they see fit.

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