Hand hygiene

Hand hygiene is a fundamental part of patient care to prevent the spread of infections.

To avoid the risk of transmitting germs such as ‘golden staph’ to our patients, healthcare staff are required perform hand hygiene in particular ways at specific moments.

Hand hygiene can be done either by washing hands with soap and water or using alcohol-based hand rub.

We measure the hand hygiene compliance of healthcare workers based on observational audits, in line with the National Hand Hygiene Initiative (NHHI) (external site).

The NHHI regularly observes the hand hygiene practices of healthcare workers while they care for patients. We feed this information back to health services and healthcare workers to help them improve their practice, which in turn keeps patients safer.

A higher percentage is better, as it indicates higher levels of compliance with hand hygiene by healthcare workers.

This data shows that our hand hygiene rates are higher (better) than the national target.

About the data

This chart shows the WA hand hygiene compliance compared to the national target of 80 per cent.

Hand hygiene is audited year-round, this graph is the average of these audits. 

The data presented is for all participating WA public hospitals.