The Local Health Board Co-ordinator (LHBC)
The Local Health Board Co-ordinator role has been developed specifically for this campaign. The purpose of the LHBC role is:
- To lead and manage the development and implementation of a local strategy, flowing from the national hand hygiene campaign, to deliver improvements in hand hygiene practice within the NHS Board.
- To promote good hand hygiene practice to staff, patients and visitors within Healthcare settings in the NHS Board.
- To undertake, and co-ordinate the undertaking of, Hand Hygiene audits within the NHS Board using the Audit Tool developed and issued by the Hand Hygiene Project.
- To ensure national campaign materials are implemented and refreshed as expected within the local NHS settings.
Furthermore, the LHBC will also be required to:
- Develop, implement and manage a local strategy which details the activities to be undertaken to improve hand hygiene practice within the NHS Board;
- Develop arrangements to promote good hand hygiene practice to staff, patients and visitors within healthcare settings in the NHS Board;
- Establish and maintain systems to evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of the hand hygiene campaign:
- Project manage the implementation of the local strategy;
- Establish and maintain effective communications and partnerships with non-NHS organisations to achieve wide dissemination of messages to the public.
For further details on the role of the LHBC, please contact the project team at the following email address:
Washyourhandsofthem@hps.scot.nhs.uk
Audit Tool
As mentioned above, one of the key responsibilities of the LHBC will be to undertake and co-ordinate hand hygiene audits within their local NHS Board area.
A Campaign Compliance and Evaluation Sub Group was formed, which included an LHBC, to consider ways in which information on hand hygiene compliance could be collated. It was agreed at an early stage that there would be three mandatory audit periods throughout the Campaign when data would be collected over a two week period and submitted to the Project Team at HPS. This aimed to allow local areas to have access to data and therefore feedback to clinical settings to address any poor or non compliance. It also aimed to present overall compliance data for Scotland to the Scottish Government Health Directorate. This Sub-Group prompted interesting discussion on the effects of mandatory compliance, including that audit is not an exact science and that it should not detract from the local activities that had been on-going for many years by local infection control teams but build on and complement these.
A complementary Protocol and Reource Pack was produced to support a standardised approach to the use of the audit tool in scotland. This can be downloaded from:
Download Protocol and Resource Pack (PDF Document 543kb)
Health Protection Scotland has published the second Compliance with Hand Hygiene - Audit Report as part of the National NHS Hand Hygiene Campaign.
This is the second report to present hand hygiene compliance at a country level by HPS (the first report was published on 27th December 2007) and continues to aid understanding of compliance throughout NHSScotland.
The report features overall audit results for hand hygiene compliance in Scotland, by NHS Board and by staff group. These are presented for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd audit periods in 2007 and 2008 when LHBCs undertook audits throughout their NHS Boards. There are a number of limitations to this type of data collection which are also described, as are the next steps that have been established in order to address hand hygiene compliance and support achieving the best possible standards.
This is available to download from:
http://www.hps.scot.nhs.uk/haiic/ic/nationalhandhygienecampaign.aspx
