Inside Duke Medicine
Take time to wash your hands
posted November 12th, 2008
Read more about the importance of handwashing at Duke in a Bloomberg news story. Cartoon by Josh Taylor.
Keith Cummings, a fourth-year medical student, has found that hospital workers cost their institutions $1.98, on average, each time they fail to wash their hands before seeing a patient.
“My objective was to give some data that would be an incentive for hospitals to undertake more comprehensive hand-hygiene compliance,” Cummings said. “And by increasing consciousness of what it costs when someone doesn’t wash their hands, maybe we can change workers’ attitudes.”
Read the complete Bloomberg article here.