Page 215 - The Power to Change Anything

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a five-person room, through several steps to the Brannon build-
ing where they are awarded their own room. Eventually they
arrive at Nirvana—an apartment of their own. Ultimately,
probably at the top of the value chain, residents are given
“WAM”—walk-around money—and the privilege to use it.
Finally, when it comes to demonstrating the power of small
rewards administered quickly and tied to vital behaviors, con-
sider what happened at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center when
Leon Bender, a urologist from Los Angeles decided to pit a best
practice he had observed on a cruise ship against one of the
finest hospitals in the world.
Dr. Bender had noticed that each time passengers returned
to the waiting cruise ship, someone squirted a shot of Purell
on their hands. Crew members also distributed the disinfectant
to passengers as they stood in the buffet lines. The good doc-
tor began to wonder if it was possible that the cruise ship staff
was more diligent with hand hygiene than the hospital staff he
had worked with for nearly four decades.
The problems associated with poor hand hygiene, Dr.
Bender realized, weren’t restricted to remote islands or devel-
oping-world shopping bazaars. The acclaimed hospital he
worked at (similar to all health-care institutions) constantly
fought the battle of hospital-transmitted diseases that are a prod-
uct of poor hand hygiene. A health-care professional picks up
bugs from one patient and then passes them on to another. It
happens all the time. Consequently, hospitals remain one of
the most dangerous places in any community, causing tens of
thousands of deaths annually. Find a way to get people to wash
their hands thoroughly between patients, and you’d go a long
way toward eliminating hospital-transmitted diseases.
When Dr. Bender returned home, he started a hand-hygiene
campaign. He quickly learned that most doctors believed that
they washed often and thoroughly enough. One study even
found that while 73 percent of doctors said they washed effec-
tively, only 9 percent actually met the industry standard.