I am thrilled and honored to be the winner of the 2019 American Nurses Association Innovation Award!
This award is an acknowledgement of what nurses have long known: patients do not clean their hands enough. Just last week, a new study by the University of Michigan found that that 14% of the 399 hospital patients they tested had superbugs on their hands or nostrils right after admission. Another 6% of patients, who didn't have multidrug-resistant organisms, or MDROs, on their hands when first hospitalized, tested positive for them later in their hospital stay.
Patient hand hygiene is something that is given scant to little attention in healthcare today. It is not measured, reported on, given supplies for or reinforced as part of day-to-day healthcare practices. Fitsi changes this by making patient hand hygiene easy for patients to do on their own without leaving their hospital bed. Patients are part of the healthcare team and their hand hygiene matters.
So what is the next step for Fitsi Health? The money so generously awarded will be used to assist with manufacturing costs and expanding our outreach and marketing efforts to increase awareness of the importance of patient hand hygiene.
Like most accomplishments in life doing something innovative engages the efforts of many. So I wish to thank everyone who has ever assisted me – you are part of this commitment to patient hand hygiene. Some praised, some questioned, some suggested, some rejected - all added to the creation of Fitsi.