CC-BY-SA-3.0/Matt H. Wade at Wikipedia
If you need to know one thing about us, it’s that we are all about hand sanitizing stations. They are a key part of a complete hand hygiene promotion campaign that combines strong visual and textual communications with a physical design that attracts use; all of which both raises health literacy and keeps healthcare-associated infections at bay.
Hospitals agree with us!
They want stations in their lobbies, staff areas, corridors and patient rooms. They want them BAD. Unfortunately, budgets are being slashed all over and they often have difficulty justifying the expenditure to the budget committees.
At this point, many hospitals start looking at “revenue generating hand sanitizing stations.”
A revenue generating hand sanitizing station makes money through advertising goods or services which is bad for promotion because these promotions compete with each other. Hospitals agree with us here as well, or at least used to. We keep hearing word of hospitals changing their policies regarding advertising just to get hand sanitizing stations of some sort in, which is a bad idea.
They draw attention, sure, but to baby wipes, not clean hands. They educate, but on the variety of moisturizing face creams available in the hospital pharmacy.
They may resemble hand sanitizing stations, but they’re not.
Good hand sanitizing stations are not valuable because they are a nice piece of furniture, but because they are the physical embodiment of the public-facing, multi-modal hand hygiene program itself. This means they draw, invite and normalize use by thousands of daily visitors through approachable design that considers human factors and ergonomics. They educate them, so that someone who didn’t appreciate the dangers of C difficile just might change their mind.
Last and least, they hold hand gel dispensers – which is nothing special; it’s something a bare wall can do, and just about all that an ad-supported station can do.
To summarize, these not are a bargain: in order to get these ad-supported stations all you have to do is completely sell out your hand hygiene program. That’s what we’d call a bad deal.
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