Think of Michael Jackson's infectious hit single "Beat It," from the 1982 album Thriller when you watch this video.
The healthcare team at Paradise Valley Hospital in National City, CA produced the video in an effort to raise handwashing compliance, which is only about 40% nationally.
Since December, hospital scrub techs, nurses, physicians and surgeons, janitors, security guards, and even chief operating officers and administrators across the country – just like those from Paradise Valley – have sprung from their chairs and started dancing down the halls and through the O.R. in time to catchy beats.
They jump and sway to rap, rock and funk, while wearing pig noses (for an H1N1 swine flu theme), splotchy paint representing germs, or large costume gloves.
Healthcare workers are making amateur YouTube videos in response to a contest sponsored by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, which announced the winners this week at its annual conference in Baltimore.
Nearly 40 videos were submitted by about 30 hospitals.
I have to say these hospital teams look like they were having a blast.
"C'mon and hit me with your flu shot," one group sings. Other videos feature songs whose names resemble their titles, "Do the ICU-2, DMC" (from Detroit Medical Center), "I Watch the Line," " I'm Gonna Wash My Hands," from Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo, CA, or "Pump It," another submittal from Paradise Valley.
Everybody seems to get in on the action, no matter their job stature or pay grade, with some videos featuring as many as 30 to 40 members of the hospitals' teams. Some call themselves catchy (get it?) names such as "The Spore Chasers," or "The Virals and a Host of Others."
"We have a number of talented employees who could sing, do video work, dance – and a lot of our employees are just hams in front of the camera!" said Ben Macapugay, Jr., of Paradise Valley. "Once we put all of those ingredients together and got the ball rolling, it took on a life of its own."
Videos were submitted by teams from Williamson Medical Center in Franklin, TN; Broward Health in Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Medical Center of Arlington, TX and St. Louis University Hospital in MO, just to name a few.
Contest organizer Vickie Brown, Associate Director of Hospital Epidemiology for University of North Carolina Health Care in Chapel Hill, said the videos are intended to "brings the message in at an emotional human level, one that lets providers connect with a particular story in a way they may not if we just tell them about compliance." On that score, she said, they were a success.
To qualify for the contest, the videos had to present a clear and strong infection prevention message about hand washing, be under 10 minutes, not promote a product or vendor, and be an effective means toward behavior change.
The winner was the particularly inspiring 4.5-minute video, "Hands," created by Daniel Lieu, a 23-year-old pharmacy student at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. Lieu told me in a phone chat – after I found him on Facebook, that he was persuaded to make the video by his father, Dale K. Lieu, MD, an infectious disease physician at Kaiser Permanente San Diego.
"My dad wanted to encourage his fellow healthcare workers to wash their hands," Lieu said "These are professionals, and they're already educated and know to do this, but many don't. So how do you get the message across in a visceral way?"
To appeal to a younger generation of caregivers, Lieu and his friends wrote rap lyrics that tell the story of a fatal infection in three parts: from the view of the "germ," then from the view of the infected child who is now dying, and then, the child's physician who now realizes he forgot to wash his hands.
"See, he came to me for healing but he's only getting sicker
He came to me for life but now he dies quicker
And I'm getting sicker as I start to reflect
Realizing maybe it was all because of neglect
Next minute he's crashing with his blood on my hands
And I'm wondering if the villain is standing where I stand."
In between the lyrics, the screen flashes statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as "50%-60% of healthcare-associated infections can be prevented by adherence to hand hygiene," and "The typical hand wash rate in healthcare workers is 40%."
Brown said Lieu's video won because "he was able to translate an important message with an emotional connection that can be more powerful, psychologically, in a way that can influence someone's behavior.
"It demonstrates the reality of what can happen in a healthcare setting if someone doesn't value something as simple as hand hygiene when patients come to us for healing," she said. And it appealed to a younger workforce that's coming up in healthcare settings that now deal with increasingly complex patients.
One interesting aspect of many of these videos is the diversity of healthcare occupations represented. One produced at Memorial Hospital in South Bend IN begins with Kreg Gruber, chief operating officer, mumbling to himself at his desk over a bottle of hand gel.
Then he starts singing the lyrics of the Black Eyed Peas song, "Let's get it started in here."
"That's it," he says, as he jumps up from the desk, and the scene shifts to a hallway filled with dancing healthcare workers all singing "Let's get it started. Let's get it started in here."
As infection preventionists, "What we're asked to do so often is change human behavior. And that's not easy to do...," Brown said.
Brown said that the videos are now being used for in-service training at dozens of hospitals and other healthcare settings around the country and are even looped into hospital TV channels in an effort to reassure patients that healthcare teams take hand hygiene seriously.
While only about 40 healthcare institutions submitted videos this year, she said she expects many more will come in for the second annual contest for 2012. The prize?
To see all the videos submitted for the contest, click here. Have fun with them.