Slide Presentation of the 2007 Annual Meeting of AHRQ

2007

• According to the CDC appropriate hand washing results in a reduced incidence of both nosocomial and community infections. Guidelines from national and international infection prevention and control organizations have repeatedly acknowledged that hand washing is the single most important procedure for preventing infections. Despite this, compliance with hand washing by health care providers is poor.

Notes:

He lectured publicly about his results in 1850, however, the reception by the medical community was cold, if not hostile. His observations went against the current scientific opinion of the time, which blamed diseases on an imbalance of the basical "humours" in the body. It was also argued that even if his findings were correct, washing one's hands each time before treating a pregnant woman, as Semmelweis advised, would be too much work. Nor were doctors eager to admit that they had caused so many deaths. Semmelweis spent 14 years developing his ideas and lobbying for their acceptance, culminating in a book he wrote in 1861. The book received poor reviews, and he responded with polemic. In 1865, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an insane asylum where he soon died from blood poisoning.
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