Healthcare Regime
What are the Issues?
In recent years there has been an increasing focus on improving infection prevention and hand hygiene in healthcare settings with the particular aim of reducing hospital acquired infections (HAIs).
From hospitals, medical centres, surgeries and clinics to occupational health environments, community care settings, nursing homes and care homes, there are two key issues that healthcare hand hygiene is concerned with:
Patient Care - ensuring that the hands of staff are clean and decontaminated as appropriate; helping to prevent the spread of harmful bacteria and viruses.
Staff Care - with the high frequency of hand washing and hand sanitising demanded, ensuring staff maintain good skin condition can be a challenge. Poor skin condition reduces levels of hand hygiene compliance and increases the risk of life-threatening infections being spread.
Good skin condition increases compliance and helps to reduce the risk of hospital acquired infections being spread.
Deb Response / A Skin Care System
To meet the daily hand hygiene challenge, we have developed the Deb Healthcare Skin Safety Regime that satisfies all occupational, community and acute healthcare needs.
With over 65 years of experience in away from home skin care, Deb is uniquely qualified to provide a structured approach to the skin safety challenges. We begin with the end game in mind – every person in every part of the healthcare operation doing “the right thing” with regard to skin safety.
Your challenges are unique to your organisation and our regime is tailored to meet your specific needs. It integrates with your own risk management activities including patient care protocols and Health and Safety procedures; occupational health requirements; and the provision of personal protective supplies such as gloves.
The regime is based on The Deb Skin Care System™ which comprises a complementary range of skin care products and support activities to overcome obstacles and encourage employee motivation to comply with a rigorous hand hygiene philosophy.
A Skin Care System
Best in class product and support activities are uniquely combined into 6-steps to create The Deb Skin Care System™.
4-Step Product Range
Our product range accomodates a broad variety of user preferences and application requirements. All Deb products are fully tested, supported and colour- coded for easy identification.
Protect — Pre-work creams to help protect the skin against contact with various workplace contaminants, irritants and working conditions by limiting the contact between the two and facilitate subsequent cleansing. This allows the mildest possible cleansers to be used.
Cleanse — This is the fundamental step in hand hygiene ‘best practice’. Apart from cleaning any visible soilings from hands, the physical action of a good hand washing technique will in fact remove high levels of bacteria and viruses present on the skin.
Sanitise — Hand sanitising is an effective way to reduce bacterial counts on visibly clean hands, when access to soap and running water is inconvenient. In healthcare environments, alcohol is the preferred active biocide for skin sanitising without the need for rinsing with water.
Restore — This is the most important step in maintaining good skin condition. As a consequence of frequent hand washing, it is necessary to regularly replenish the natural oils and secretions lost from the skin via the use of a conditioning cream. For healthcare workers, maintaining good skin condition is vital to both their own long term health and the health of those in their care.
2-Step Support Activities
The Deb Support Package provides easy to understand education and training materials to raise skin care awareness and encourage appropriate use and compliance. This combines with ongoing technical support to provide help and advice in relation to the use of Deb products and an auditing programme to help implement standards and drive compliance.
Educate — The provision of employee education and awareness materials to encourage good skin safety practice in the workplace.
Audit — Conducting pre and post audits to help establish, maintain and measure effectiveness.
Real Benefits
"The Deb Healthcare Skin Safety Regime is designed to reduce risk to patient safety from hospital acquired infections through cross contamination."
The Deb Healthcare Skin Safety Regime is designed to help raise the level of staff compliance, improve skin condition and reduce the risk of cross-infection from potentially fatal bacteria and viruses.
Deb offers low cost-in-use product and the potential to reduce the many indirect costs associated with poor hand hygiene and the spread of germs. Apart from personal cost, the financial costs to a healthcare organisation are likely to be many times higher than the cost of skin care products themselves. In addition, the adoption of the Deb approach will also provide the following benefits:
- Mitigate the risk of cross infection through improper hand hygiene
- Enhance regulatory compliance
- Reduce absence through skin safety issues
- Motivate employees to comply with hand hygiene protocols
By choosing Deb as your skin care provider you will benefit from one standard of skin care for all your requirements.
Our commitment is to conduct:
- Site audits
- System maintenance
- Regular management review meetings
- Introduction on new products, service and measurement tools
