Healthcare workers in intensive care units (ICUs) are regularly missing opportunities to clean their hands during the care of patients, despite its critical importance for infection control, according to new research being presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Worryingly, the authors say, hand hygiene compliance was lowest when moving from dirtier to cleaner patient care tasks than from cleaner to dirtier tasks, further increasing the risk of infection. Interventions to improve hand hygiene compliance should teach healthcare workers to move from cleaner to dirtier tasks to minimise risks to patients, researchers say. Despite concerted efforts to tackle the prevalence of healthcare associated infections, they are still one of the most common complications of hospital care, affecting around 30% of patients in ICUs in high-income countries.

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