In cases where equipment is being placed in a container or bin and picked back up, nurses and doctors are required to wash their hands or use alcohol sanitizer before going back to the container to use the same equipment.Independent studies by Ignaz Semmelweis in 1846 in Vienna and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. in 1843 in Boston established a link between the hands of health care workers and the spread of hospital-acquired disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) state that "It is well documented that the most important measure for preventing the spread of pathogens is effective handwashing". In the developed world, hand washing is mandatory in most health care settings and required by many different regulators.In the United States, OSHA standards require that employers must provide readily accessible hand washing facilities, and must ensure that employees wash hands and any other skin with soap and water or flush mucous membranes with water as soon as feasible after contact with blood or other potentially infectious materials (OPIM).In the UK healthcare professionals have adopted the Ayliffe Technique, based on the 6 step method developed by Graham Ayliffe, JR Babb and AH Quoraishi. Drying is an essential part of the hand hygiene process. In November 2008, a non-peer-reviewed study was presented to the European Tissue Symposium by the University of Westminster, London, comparing the bacteria levels present after the use of paper towels, warm air hand dryers, and modern jet-air hand dryers.
Determining the presence of a hospital acquired infection requires an infection control practitioner (ICP) to review a patients chart and see if the patient had the signs and symptom of an infection. Surveillance definitions exist for infections of the bloodstream, urinary tract, pneumonia, surgical sites and gastroenteritis. Surveillance traditionally involved significant manual data assessment and entry in order to assess preventative actions such as isolation of patients with an infectious disease. Increasingly, computerized software solutions are becoming available that assess incoming risk messages from microbiology and other online sources. By reducing the need for data entry, software can reduce the data workload of ICPs, freeing them to concentrate on clinical surveillance. As of 1998, approximately one third of healthcare acquired infections were preventable. Surveillance and preventative activities are increasingly a priority for hospital staff. The Study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control (SENIC) project by the U.S. CDC found in the 1970s that hospitals reduced their nosocomial infection rates by approximately 32 per cent by focusing on surveillance activities and prevention efforts. Isolation and quarantine
In healthcare facilities, medical isolation refers to various physical measures taken to interrupt nosocomial spread of contagious diseases.