Patient Safety Sentinel: Hand Hygiene and PPE in Emergencies

Hand Hygiene and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in Emergencies

Your safety is important! Do not rush into activities that can result in harm to you.

  • An employee with a weakened immune system should not enter a room unprotected from a communicable disease.
  • In a TRUE EMERGENCY, hand hygiene, PPE, and equipment cleaning may be suspended, if the delay involved in doing these activities may cause greater harm to the patient (this is a rare occurrence and not the case in every emergency situation).
  • Our standard is to always follow safety protocols. EXCEPTIONS SHOULD BE LIMITED TO TRUE EMERGENCIES ONLY.
  • Examples of emergencies, include: initial responders to a cardiac or respiratory emergency, or preventing a patient fall. However, once the initial care is started, others arriving should complete hand hygiene, don PPE as needed, and insure clean equipment is used.
  • Once additional staffs are at the bedside, those that did not perform hand hygiene or put on PPE as appropriate should be relieved so that they can complete these tasks.
  • Once the initial emergency care has occurred, all employees should follow our hand hygiene, PPE, and equipment cleaning policies.

Protecting our patients is the top priority at Cooper University Health Care. We need 100 percent compliance with all patient safety procedures.

A sentinel is one who stands guard or watch to protect others. We need all employees to be sentinels to protect our patients and keep watch to ensure all patient safety procedures are being strictly followed.

One Team. One Purpose.