Cleaning, hygiene and safety are all front-of-mind for healthcare staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tork manufacturer Essity is supporting them with an award-winning training app and a comprehensive healthcare toolkit.
We are in the midst of a healthcare emergency. Hospital staff are performing a Herculean task, delivering life-saving care to COVID-19 sufferers up and down the nation while looking after other patients as well.
Medical workers need to be completely focused on the job in hand. However, the topics of cleaning and hygiene have never been as important as they are now.
This is why hygiene products manufacturer Essity is supporting healthcare staff by addressing the crucial details of day-to-day hygiene operations and training. The company has come up with an award-winning hand hygiene training app and is offering the healthcare sector a comprehensive toolkit that includes cleaning tips, downloadable resources and dispenser placement advice.
“Clean hands are key to stopping the spread of diseases and infections,” said Essity’s Healthcare Marketing Director Tom Bergin. “We have therefore launched the Safe at Work: COVID-19 Healthcare Toolkit during these extremely challenging times in order to support healthcare professionals and to show our appreciation for all they do.”
The Safe at Work: COVID-19 Healthcare Toolkit includes resources for better hand and surface hygiene and reminds staff about the importance of cleaning frequently-touched areas in the patient environment. These include the over-bed tables, chairs, door handles and bed rails.
The toolkit also provides downloadable instruction posters that can be used as reminders for staff and visitors around the hospital, as well as guidance on the best places to site hand sanitiser dispensers in order to encourage good hand hygiene behaviours.
“New hospitals have been either built or repurposed to treat COVID-19 patients, and these bring with them new opportunities to reinforce hand hygiene messages through optimal dispenser placement,” says Tom. “Studies have shown that it is more important to place an existing hand sanitiser dispenser in a prominent position rather than to simply provide more of the units. And hand sanitiser usage can actually be increased by more than 50 per cent if you simply position them correctly.”
According to Essity dispensers should be placed at hospital entrances, near to sinks, at nurses’ stations and on walking routes and corridors to allow good hand hygiene to be carried out on the go.
Also designed to support healthcare staff is the Tork VR Clean Hands Training and Education app. This uses virtual reality to provide healthcare staff with realistic scenarios in which hand hygiene needs to be carried out.
Trainees put on a VR headset and are then confronted with a series of situations in the virtual world in which they are expected to practice hand hygiene. Their results are assessed on how far they comply with the World Health Organisation’s (WHOs) “5 Moments for Hand Hygiene”.
Any member of staff who fails to perform hand hygiene at the right moment is given the opportunity to try again. “They soon learn to adopt excellent hand hygiene standards both in the virtual and in the real world,” says Essity’s Sales Manager Liam Mynes.
The Tork VR Clean Hands Training app has won a 2020 Interclean Innovation Award for being “user-friendly, accessible and capable of stimulating behavioral change in a fun and engaging way”. Winners of the prestigious Interclean Innovation Awards were announced on May 12, with the Tork VR Clean Hands Training app receiving the Category Winner award for Related Products/Services.
The interactive hand hygiene training simulation was described by the judges as “the perfect solution for the need to educate people worldwide on hand hygiene”.
According to a Tork study, around 80 per cent of healthcare professionals would like to improve their hand hygiene compliance – but they often find traditional forms of hand hygiene training to be uninspiring. The fact that the Tork VR Clean Hands tool moves training into the virtual world is said to make it more immediate and interactive.
The Tork VR Clean Hands Training and Education tool is free to download via the App Store and Google Play. Participants need a compatible smartphone and VR headset with remote control or equivalent. And the Safe at Work: COVID-19 Healthcare Toolkit can be accessed at: tork.co.uk/safeatwork
Also visit www.tork.co.uk/TorkVR for further information.
