Enforcement of hand washing

We are a manufacturer of rigid plastic containers and lids mostly for the dairy industry. We mold and print.

Recently we have noticed a general lack of compliance to our hand washing protocols.

Has anyone have had to reinforce hand washing procedures and if so, how was this accomplished?

I do not like policing employees and wish to find a more intelligent way of enforcement.

Thanks,

Tamale

Do you have an ATP meter? I like to show employees how washing their hands will greatly reduce the RLU. It shows them that hand washing works and is important. 

I had that problem at my previous work, trainings are your best bet to get through to employees if you do not like policing employees.

In most cases, training is the best direction to go. It is important to outline the importance of handwashing and the negatives.  Sometimes, you have the let the staff think of the negative consequences in terms of their loved ones being affected which sees an impact in their way of thinking.

Hi tamale,

In addition to the above, I suppose it is possible that yr handwashing protocol might be flawed/difficult to follow/etc also ?

Hello Tamale,

If the problem is recurring, I suggest make a root cause analysis to find the reason why your hand washing procedure failed. I think awareness talks and training must be conducted for your workers. They may not value the importance of hand washing.

regards,

redfox

I think the first course needs to be re training and the reasons WHY hand washing is necessary. Failing this there is many turn stalls type equipment or door handles that automatically dispense hand sanitiser you could look into.

Best regards

John

Picture of bacteria from the hands of a health worker:  Bacteria on Hand (Health Worker).jpg   146.59KB   1 downloads

Aloha,  If you have repeat noncompliance, you need to escalate to disciplinary action the the repeat offender(s).  If there is no enforcement with noncompliance, you won't see the change. They need to understand hand washing is your basic defense against food safety issues. 

Sometimes I find that employees are not washing their hands because the practice is "too difficult".  Make it easy - fool proof - so that when employees enter the production area they have no choice but to wash their hands - and if they do not, it is obvious.

Best wishes, Tanya

Sometimes during the training you have to let them place themselves at the receiving end of the stick and most times they get it.  You usually see an improvement but lapses will occur if you don't keep reminding or monitoring them.

I hope these suggestions work out for the best for you.

Charissa

I went to a really interesting talk a while back on food safety culture.  It raised a really important point; everyone is really bad at washing their hands.  You then take your average person in the street with 25 years of shocking hand washing experience then expect them, after a 5 minute training session to be great at it.  It's not going to happen.

So this is what I am working on.

We train people before they walk through the door.  We importantly explain why.

We then train people face to face, get them to demonstrate.

We have posters up in the vicinity of hand washing stations.

What we're moving onto now is some quick 4 minute recap training sessions, mostly by video as reminders.

If there are specific issues we may take groups away from the shop floor to do something more intensive. 

We're also training staff not to walk past a colleague washing their hands badly.

All of this is verified by auditing, CCTV (we watch back the feed sometimes at random and if anyone is seen not washing their hands at all they are disciplined).

So it's the typical technical thing.  You set the standard; communicate the standard, train it, verify it, put in corrective actions, change the standard if needed and keep on and on and on...  the thing which that talk on culture taught me is training is never a one off activity.