Exactly. And the previous problem wasn't that doctors and nurses weren't washing their hands, it was that they weren't washing them well enough. A quick wash as one might do before eating a meal is not the same level of washing as required for someone who has had their hands exposed to, say, MRSA or who is about to interact with a sick patient.

If that's what they actually checked, I can see doctors avoiding washing at the washing stations to not get caught with errors, which is even worse than getting it wrong. Talk about bad incentives...

However, I would consider bad hand washing almost as neglegient. It's really not rocket science

Actually, it is. This is a classic example of blaming the offender and not the process. Many hospitals (and this is borne out by research conducted by colleagues of mine; I'm not making this up) don't even have soap dispensers near sinks. Some hospitals mistakenly cross-label hand sanitizer and soap. Things are simple as housekeeping being late refilling paper towel dispensers cause drops in adherence rates. Can you carry a coffee cup from room to room, or is that an infection vector as well? What about chart updating? Do you wash your hands before or after touching a shared computer keyboard at the nursing station (answer: both, but many nursing stations don't have sinks).

Blaming healthcare providers for not washing their hands is like blaming John Q Public for the housing crisis. The reality is much, much more complicated, and solutions to the problem are equally so. Healthcare is an incredibly complicated ecosystem, and even things are simple as hand washing are affected by dozens of factors, many of which are non-obvious at first. Root cause analysis and a judicious application of process change can help greatly, but the reality is that even simple things such as this do not change overnight in healthcare. It's harder than you think.