The ‘World Hand Hygiene Day’ on social media, running under the slogan ‘Unite for Safety: Clean your Hands’, was applauded by Jules Storr, former president of the Infection Prevention Society, who said, “I love the theme of this year’s campaign – the culture around safety and quality and of course infection prevention and control is everything.”

Here at InPhase, we understand the importance of proper hand hygiene in the healthcare sector in keeping staff and patients safe from infection, especially considering the Covid-19 pandemic that swept through the world in the last couple of years.

To help inspire and support this culture of quality, hygiene and infection prevention, Audit Oversight from InPhase emerged to elevate hand hygiene audit completion rates as well as many other audits and improve the safety of patients and staff.

Why trust us?

We are InPhase: delivering performance and assurance systems since 1991. Our software has helped take the performance, quality, safety, assurance, and outcomes for hundreds of high-reliability organisations in the UK to their next level.

The new Audit Oversight app adds to our range of more than 20 triangulated healthcare apps in our Oversight suite. Other triangulated apps include Quality Oversight for compliance assurance with CQC, NICE, and CAS and a new Incident Oversight app with complete Learn from Patient Safety certification from NHS England.

Audit Oversight from InPhase is entirely customisable and scalable, with no limits on the number of audits you can create. InPhase creates innovative, easy to use software with end-users and administrators in mind. We believe the tools you use shouldn’t slow you down or make your life more difficult. It’s about supporting you daily to provide the best possible patient care .

The importance of hand hygiene and audits

Hand hygiene:

In the eighteenth century, “wash your hands” was considered controversial advice in healthcare. Today, the nay-sayers are considered the mad ones, as hand hygiene is the single most cost-effective solution to infection prevention and control; hand hygiene audits, however, are another matter.

Hand hygiene is so essential in healthcare that large organisations like WHO conduct worldwide campaigns to highlight its significance. In addition, nurses are encouraged to become hand hygiene role models with the aim that others follow suit.

Hand hygiene audits:

To guarantee we keep to the same high standards across the Trust, we run audits to ensure staff are singing from the same hymn sheet. However, some healthcare staff believe they are “paper pushing check-box exercises that consume valuable, scarce resources and pointless administration”, admitting “we do them because we have to.” Regardless, audits are crucial in compliance: a study in 2017 found that hand hygiene compliance was significantly improved from 44.5% to 78.5% among nurses when an audit is in place.

The structure of audits, the act of completion and the results of an audit can drastically increase the action that’s being audited: in this case, hand hygiene. Regular audits must take place to improve audit compliance. These audits must be quick and easy to complete, as healthcare staff time is precious, creating a culture of compliance in the fight against infection and many other aspects of patient safety.

What's getting in the way of completion?

Many Trusts have hard to use, outdated digital systems, and others opt for Excel, Word documents or even pen and paper to manage audit data capture. Any of these factors lead to lengthy data capture and analysis processes, an accumulation of several documents to access relevant information and an overall disdain for audits from the people who must complete them, ultimately lowering audit completion rates. To create a culture of action surrounding hand hygiene and other audits, we must reframe the perception of audits from a hindrance to a helpful aid.

Not only do we have a blog post on this topic "The ultimate guide to clinical audits", but we have also created an updated Audit Oversight, the newest updated addition to our Oversight suite of more than 20 integrated apps, which can fully triangulate with Incident Oversight, that reports and prevents incidents, and Quality Oversight, to manage CQC self-assessments and NICE guidelines as well as CAS alerting system for complete assurance.

How to skyrocket hand-hygiene audit completion rates:

Audit Oversight is an innovative, customisable, scalable digital audit system that revolutionises the way we do audits.

The ideal audit tool for your organisation will need:

Quick and easy data capture forms

Audit Oversight is quick and easy to use with the help of Fast Forms, which has multiple features to speed up form filling, including only providing questions relevant to previous answers, eliminating the need for “N/A” answers in irrelevant fields, saving valuable minutes at each data capture stage. Fast and straightforward audit data capture is key to improving user engagement and willingness to complete the audit.

For example, returning to hand hygiene audits, Wirral Community Health NHS Trust increased its hand hygiene audit compliance to 95%. You can learn more about their story form Paula here.

Audit Oversight’s data capture form is fully customisable and scalable, so users can quickly and easily make specific changes that are immediately deployed across the whole Trust. As well as this, Audit Oversight is compatible with any browser device, running at high speed across all platforms, giving staff uninhibited access from anywhere at any time, making audit data capture more accessible and faster than ever. The built-in QR code generator creates instant links to the exact audit with a quick smartphone scan to let your teams complete location-based audits without wasting time searching for the correct form.

Inspire Action

Managers have built-in dashboards to see what audits their team members still need to complete. They can see immediately what audits need doing, how many need to be done in a specific time frame and how many they have met. The disparity is tracked visually and is found instantly, so they know what to do and when. Thanks to the dynamic data capture form, they know audits take minutes to complete, inspiring audit completion across the Trust.

Following the completion of the audit, staff can create actions in alignment with the audit results and your Trust’s broader achievement goals, so staff can see the direct influence of the audits and the steps that follow. Visibly outlining the links between audit and effect increases the likelihood of audit completion, as the impact is clear. In addition, action assurance in Audit Oversight enables all audit actions to be tracked from creation to completion and assessment of effects.

Audit actions triangulate with all other CQC actions, improvement plan actions, incident related actions, and standalone action plans to view the combined action workload on any division, ward team and individual.

What this means for you...

The most important points to take away are:

• Audits are essential for quality compliance and improvement; for instance, hand hygiene audits are crucial in encouraging hand hygiene compliance. In addition, the structure and regularity of an audit stand as a helpful reminder to staff.
• Many current audit systems are not fit for purpose: a collection of documents, both digital and physical, are not an efficient way for audit management, wasting both clinical time and money.
• A slow audit process cause a disdain for audits among staff, leading to a decline in audit completion rates.
• A reframing of the perception of audits is necessary for higher completion rates. Audits must no longer be strenuous, time-consuming work but revolutionary, innovative and fast with the help of an engaging, easy-to-use and reliable digital system.
• Audit Oversight from InPhase solves audits’ issues, making them quicker, easier, and more cost-effective than ever.
• Make audits more action-oriented and get real-time reporting clearly and visually with triangulation capabilities to other apps to help focus your time in the most impactful areas.

Don’t waste any more valuable time – see Audit Oversight in action with one of our experts.

Robert Hobbs

Chief Executive Officer

InPhase’s Chief Executive and Founder, Robert has been the visionary leading InPhase to be one of the UK's leading providers of management, governance and assurance solutions, and helping organisations align their actions and goals more easily and efficiently with InPhase's suite of integrated apps.