THE Chief Minister Katy Gallagher has called for improvement in clinical hand washing at the Canberra Hospital after new figures reveal that the hospital is below the national benchmark.

It is the first time that hand hygiene results have been published nationally, broken down by hospital by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s results of national hand hygiene audits on the MyHospitals website.

Based on an October audit of hand hygiene processes, Canberra Hospital reported a rate of 64.4 per cent, which is  below the 70 per cent national benchmark. Calvary reported a result of 69.9 per cent.

While the result for the Canberra Hospital was below the national benchmark, it was at the national benchmark rate in the previous, unpublished audit in July, the Chief Minister said.

The drop in the rate was due to a change in way the information was collected, as the top-performing wards in July were not included in the October audit, resulting in a drop in the Canberra Hospital rate.

“It is important to note that our results for hospital acquired infections are considerably better than the benchmark of two cases per 10,000 patient days, with Canberra Hospital reporting a rate of 1.06 cases per 10,000 patient days and Calvary with a result of 0.60 cases,” the Chief Minister said.

“Nonetheless, I have asked the Canberra Hospital to ensure that our hand hygiene rate improves over the 2012 year.

“The publication of the results will help this as it provides a clear, and public, demonstration of how hospitals are performing against national targets, and ensures we are able to target our efforts in poorer performing wards.

“Patients and their families can help by asking doctors and nurses if they have washed their hands. This is a way for our community to help our clinicians to get better at hand hygiene.

“And all visitors to our hospitals can also help by washing their hands with the antiseptic hand wash that is available at hospital entries and at the entry of all wards of the hospital.

“The main reason for the reporting of hand hygiene results is to reduce hospital acquired infection, so it is important we continue our efforts to lift our performance in this area.”