Staff at Regina hospitals continue to have a hand-washing problem, despite being informed of the need to clean up their act in 2018.
A followup audit by provincial auditor Tara Clemett found that as of December 2025, the Saskatchewan Health Authority had yet to implement all of the recommendations her office made seven years ago.
That’s a problem, Clemett said.
“When we’ve gone our second or third time for a followup and an agency hasn’t addressed the recommendation made, then that’s when we start to see concerns,” she said.
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Back in 2018, then-provincial auditor Judy Ferguson released a report that found Regina hospitals did not track hand washing rates using blind, direct observation audits and when units did track compliance it was “consistently below their target of 100 per cent.”
Clemett’s followup audit released last month found that some of the concerns have yet to be addressed.
The Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) now requires unit managers to monitor hand hygiene compliance rates and develop action plans when those rates fall below an 80 per cent threshold.
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The audit found that as of December 2025, 26 of the 60 units at hospitals in Regina, or 43 per cent, had “unacceptable compliance rates.”
Ten units had compliance rates below the 80 per cent threshold, ranging between 46.6 per cent and 79.1 per cent.
The other 16 units had few or no hand-hygiene audits completed.
“We have a number of units that aren’t even necessarily doing the audits, and then when they are doing the audits, they aren’t formulating those action plans to say, ‘Well, how are we going to address and how we gonna get these rates up?'” Clemett said.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted, hands can be a vector for the spread of disease.
Simon Ntumba Makubudi, a registered nurse and nurse practitioner who is an instructor at the University of Regina, said touching is one of the ways humans transmit the microorganisms that carry viruses and pathogens.
Washing your hands helps break that line of transmission, Makubudi said.
Despite the best efforts to clean and sanitize, patients in a hospital or clinic setting can be carrying various pathogens, Makubudi said.
It’s why having clean hands among staff is just as important for patient safety as their own.
“They have to maintain a good hand hygiene to make sure that the microbes coming from one patient, doesn’t transmit to the other patients or to the public in general,” Makubudi said.
Preventing the spread of hospital-acquired infections is ultimately what the auditor is trying to have the SHA address.
Those can include staph infections and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can extend a patient’s stay in a hospital and potentially even lead to further complications.
It’s estimated that at least 8,000 people die in Canada every year from hospital-acquired infections.
The followup audit found that although the number of hospital-acquired infections has decreased since 2018, the number of cases has steadily increased over the last three years.
The SHA did not provide anyone for an on-camera interview, citing staff shortages due to summer holidays.
Instead, it provided a statement that did not directly address the question of why it has yet to fully comply with the 2018 audit.
The statement said hand hygiene is a critical component of infection prevention and “plays an important role in reducing the spread of hospital acquired infections.”
The SHA also said that when a unit falls below an 80 per cent standard, corrective actions may be taken, including “reviewing hand hygiene policies with staff, enhanced hand hygiene performance monitoring, and identifying factors that are contributing to the unit’s non-compliance. ”
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Back in 2012, officials with the then-Regina Qu’Appelle Health Authority told CBC that transparency was key when addressing concerns about hand-washing compliance.
Kateri Singer, the person in charge of infection prevention at the health authority, said 100 per cent compliance with handwashing rules was the “single most important thing we can do as health-care workers.”
Singer told CBC that the public has a right to know whether health-care workers are keeping their hands clean so patients can hold them to account.
She added that transparency can be a catalyst to changing behaviour.
