Training Tuesday: Why Washing Your Hands Properly Actually Matters
Part of our occasional series for anyone willing to learn — family carers, new starters, or anyone who's ever given their hands a quick rinse and called it done.
Week Zero: The Language of Care (Words We Use and Words We Avoid)
Week one: How to Use a Slide Sheet (and How Not To)
Week two: How to Use a Hoist and Sling (and How Not To)
Week Three: How to Identify Pressure Sores (and What to Avoid)
week Four: Why Washing Your Hands Properly Actually Matters
Before We Start
This one sounds almost too basic to write about. Everybody knows you should wash your hands. But "knowing" and "doing it properly, every time, at the right moments" are two very different things — and hand hygiene is, by a wide margin, the single most effective infection control measure available to anyone providing care, whether you're a trained carer or a family member helping out at home.
This isn't a lecture. It's the specific detail that actually makes the difference between a quick rinse that does almost nothing and proper handwashing that genuinely protects the person you're caring for.
Why This Matters More Than People Think
Hands are the primary route by which infections travel between people, surfaces, and food. Every door handle, every medication packet, every piece of raw chicken, every tissue — all of it leaves something on your hands that you then carry to the next thing you touch. For someone with a healthy immune system, that's usually a minor inconvenience. For someone who is older, immunosuppressed, recovering from surgery, managing a stoma, or living with a condition like COPD or diabetes, it can be the difference between a normal week and a hospital admission.
This is why hand hygiene sits at the very start of infection control training, not as an afterthought — it's the intervention with the strongest evidence behind it, and it costs nothing.
When to Wash — The Moments That Actually Matter
Handwashing isn't a once-in-the-morning ritual. It needs to happen at specific points, every time, without exception:
Before any food preparation — and again if you touch raw meat, fish, or eggs partway through, before touching anything else
Before any personal care task — washing, dressing, oral hygiene, continence care
After any personal care task — even if gloves were worn
After removing gloves — gloves are not a substitute for handwashing, they're an addition to it
Before and after handling medication
After using the toilet, or helping someone else use one
After blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing
Before eating
After handling rubbish, laundry, or anything soiled
On arrival at a visit, and before leaving it
If you're ever unsure whether a moment counts — it probably does. Handwashing is one of the few things in care where over-doing it has no downside.
How to Actually Do It Properly
This is the part most people get wrong, not through carelessness but because nobody ever showed them the specific technique.
1. Wet your hands with warm running water first, before applying soap. Soap on dry hands doesn't lather properly and doesn't clean as well.
2. Use enough soap to cover all surfaces — not just a token squirt.
3. Rub thoroughly for at least 20 seconds. This is the step almost everyone shortens. Twenty seconds is roughly the length of humming "Happy Birthday" twice through, and it needs to cover:
Palms rubbed together
Backs of both hands
Between every finger
The backs of the fingers (interlocked, rubbing back and forth)
Thumbs, gripped and rotated
Fingertips rubbed into the opposite palm — this is the part people miss most often, and fingertips are exactly the part of the hand that touches food, medication, and skin most directly
4. Rinse thoroughly under running water, don't just wipe the soap off.
5. Dry completely — with a clean towel or paper towel, not on your uniform or trousers. Wet hands transfer bacteria far more easily than dry ones, so this step isn't optional either.
6. Use the towel to turn off the tap, if it's a manual tap, so you don't recontaminate your clean hands on the same handle you touched with dirty ones.
What About Hand Sanitiser?
Alcohol-based hand sanitiser is a useful addition, particularly between moments when you can't get to a sink — but it is not a substitute for soap and water in every situation.
Sanitiser is fine for: a quick decontamination between tasks when hands aren't visibly soiled, or as an extra measure before touching medication.
Sanitiser is not enough for: hands that are visibly dirty or greasy, after using the toilet, and — importantly — it does not reliably kill certain infections including norovirus and some types of C. diff, both of which require actual soap and water to physically wash away rather than chemically kill. If there's any suspicion of a stomach bug in the house, soap and water every time, no exceptions.
Condition-Specific Notes
Diabetes — clients managing blood glucose monitoring need scrupulously clean hands before testing, since residue on fingertips (fruit juice, sugar, hand cream) can produce an inaccurately high reading. Wash and dry thoroughly before every test, not just wipe with an alcohol swab.
Stoma care — hand hygiene before and after every pouch change is non-negotiable, given how close the hands are to output during the change, and given that peristomal skin is often already vulnerable. See our Stoma Care page for the full pouch-change procedure.
Complex care and PEG feeding — anyone preparing or administering tube feeds needs hospital-standard hand hygiene beforehand, because the feed goes directly into the digestive system with none of the natural defences that eating by mouth provides.
COPD and respiratory conditions — clients with compromised lung function are significantly more vulnerable to the consequences of a minor cold turning into a serious chest infection. Careful hand hygiene from everyone in the household — not just the carer — meaningfully reduces this risk. See our COPD and Respiratory Care page.
Immunosuppression, including during cancer treatment — for clients who are neutropenic following chemotherapy, ordinary hand hygiene becomes a genuinely serious protective measure rather than a nicety. A minor infection that would be nothing to most people can be dangerous here. See our Cancer Care page.
Wound care and pressure sore management — hands must be washed immediately before any dressing check or skin inspection, since introducing bacteria to already-compromised skin is one of the most preventable causes of wound infection. See our Pressure Sore Prevention page.
If You Want to Learn Properly
If you're a family carer and would like to see correct technique demonstrated in person rather than just read about it, ask us next time we're at the house. It costs nothing and takes two minutes to show properly.
If this kind of detail interests you rather than bores you, that's a good sign for a career in care. We cover infection control thoroughly in every carer's induction at The Coach House before they ever work unsupervised. Have a look at our Careers page.
📞 01948 411222 ✉️ mail@nshomecare.co.uk
North Shropshire Homecare The Coach House, 15/17 Green End, Whitchurch, SY13 1AD