By By Dan Hounsell

As COVID-19 vaccinations continue to rollout nationwide, healthcare facilities are taking great pains to ensure all employees have access to vaccines and that the coronavirus and other pathogens do not spread further within their walls.

If infection prevention teams want to find the source of a pathogenic outbreak in a hospital setting due to poor hand hygiene compliance (HHC), look first at the nurses, according to Infection Control Today. Nurses are much more likely to be super spreaders of microbes that are primarily spread by hand, according to a new study.

Investigators with the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands, said in so many words that nurses are more likely to be super spreaders of pathogens because they travel throughout facilities, moving from patient room to patient room and beyond. The study took place in the University Medical Center Groningen, a hospital in the Netherlands with more than 10,000 employees and 1,400 beds.