Handshake-Free Zone: Keep Those Hands – and Germs – to Yourself in the Hospital

Parga said she has tried several alternatives to shaking hands, including bowing, making eye contact and touching people on the shoulder. She believes some of the other options are more intimate than a handshake — and they open up a conversation about safety. “Especially in a fragile patient population like the NICU, we really need to think about how we can protect our patients,” she said.

On a recent afternoon, as Parga walked through the Westwood NICU, she introduced herself to a mother who was holding her infant son.

“Hi. I’m Dr. Parga,” she said. “Are you Mom? I’m not gonna shake your hand. … It’s to help prevent infection in the NICU.”

Meena Garg, a neonatologist who is the medical director of the NICU in Westwood, said she still finds not shaking hands uncomfortable sometimes, because patients often extend their hands in greeting. “You feel like you are being rude,” she said.

But Garg said she supports the handshake-free zone, because it is an easy — and inexpensive — way to reduce infections. “I am the medical director so I have to look at costs,” she said. “This doesn’t cost anything, but it may be just as important as anything else we do.”

As part of the UCLA survey, Sklansky and his colleagues asked staff and parents what they thought of the new handshake-free zones.

The majority of health care workers supported the idea — especially medical school students and nurses. Male doctors were the most resistant to giving up the handshake, partly because they weren’t convinced it was necessary to prevent infections.

Families, however, were universally supportive of the handshake-free zone, Sklansky found.

On one recent day in the NICU, Brittney Scott stood beside the crib of her 2-week-old son, Samuel, as he slept. He had ended up there with intestinal problems.

Scott said she’d never heard of a handshake-free zone and had instinctively offered her hand to a doctor when she first arrived. She said she was “a little taken aback at first” when the doctor declined to take her hand. “But once you really understand the meaning behind it, it’s great.”

Scott knows Samuel is at risk of infection, so avoiding germs is critical. She said she now prefers a smile to a handshake.

“A smile goes a long way in here,” she said. “There’s a lot of ups and downs … being a parent to a NICU baby.”