The Importance of Education in the Compliance of Healthcare Workers with Hand Hygiene

Objectives: Hospital infections occur generally as a result of inappropriate patient care practices.At the present time, providing behavioral change in health care workers is among the most compelling fields in infection control.Compliance rate of healthcare workers with hand hygiene recommendations is below 50% on average worldwide.In that respect, the role of infection control team in detection and prevention of hospital infections is very important. Materials and Methods:In this prospective and observational study, we aimed to investigate the behaviours of healthcare workers about the compliance with hand hygiene, in three different adult ICUs of Ankara Numune Training and Research Hospital between October 2006 and January 2007.One of the ICUs (General Surgery) was classified as the study group (Group A), and other 2 ICUs (Reanimation 1 and 2) (Group B and C) were collectively termed as the control group.The study was conducted in three consecutive stages as uninformed observation, post-educational and post-feedback observation. Results:The compliance of seventy-four health care workers with hand hygiene were observed during 2072 patient hours and 13263 patient contacts were investigated.In the 1 st stage, the incompatibility was 93% in all groups.In the A group, the incompatibility rate of 92% at the 1 st stage fell to 58% and 24% in the 2 nd and 3 rd stages, respectively (p<0.05).In the control group, there was no statistically significant change between 1 st and 2 nd stage incompatibility rates (96% and 94%, respectively, p=0.5). Conclusion:The compliance rates of our ICU healthcare workers with hand hygiene were found to be low.It has been demonstrated that interactive and applied education were found to be effective in increasing compliance with hand hygiene as well as theoretical instruction transfer; however, it was not as successful as giving personal feedback.