Bathing and skin cleansing/disinfection practices are important infection prevention and control measures in hospitalised patients. Yet there are few studies for the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) environment, and some practices may pose peculiar risk, for example inadvertent infection when using contaminated tap water.1 While a meta-analysis in adult patients, mostly in intensive care, showed that daily washing with chlorhexidine gluconate halved the risk of catheter-related bloodstream infections,2 the latest national evidence-based guidelines for preventing healthcare-associated infections in the National Health Service (‘epic3’) contain no specific recommendations regarding bathing or regular antiseptic washes for neonates/children.3 To investigate current UK practices, we conducted a telephone questionnaire of all 60 tertiary-level NICUs. We asked senior/lead nurses about their unit’s bathing/skin cleansing policy. We surveyed between November 2019 and February 2020 and used a bespoke pro forma (online supplemental file S1).### Supplementary data …
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Dhamodaran et al. (2020) studied this question.
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