In Tina Rosenberg’s column in The New York Times, she discusses one of the maddeningly simple but serious problems in health care: Getting health care professionals to wash their hands before touching patients.

This should not be so hard. As is true of many things in health care, it should not be hard, but it is.

This article explains how technology may be able to help humans who fail to wash their hands.

Just checking: How about you? Do you wash your hands when you should? Are you more careful during flu season? Patients and families also need to pay attention to this. Germs are not surprises families want to share.

The New York Times

…”A health care worker’s hands are the main route infections take to move from one patient to another. One recent study of several intensive care units — where the patients most vulnerable to infection reside — showed that hands were washed on only one quarter of the necessary occasions.”

Source: The New York Times, April 25, 2011