Highlights
- •Despite multiple hand hygiene resources in hospitals patient report minimal practice.
- •Majority of patients report hand hygiene products are for staff only not patients.
- •Patients perceive staff hand hygiene as more important than their own hand hygiene.
- •Patients report minimal use of sinks, wall hand sanitizer dispensers, towelettes.
- •Compared to home, patients report dissatisfaction with their inpatient hand hygiene.
- •Current inpatient hand hygiene practice and education strategies may be insufficient.
Background
Studies that examine the perceptions and behaviors of patients regarding patient hand
hygiene rarely examine the viewpoint of patients about their hand hygiene behavior
relative to current resources provided in the hospital.
Methods
Voluntary interviews that employed a 16-item survey tool were used among patients
(N = 107) in outpatient clinics at post-admission visits. The survey was created using
the Behavior Change Wheel, Capability, Opportunity, Motivation Behavior model. Patients
were asked whether they brought hand sanitizer to the hospital, used hospital resources
to clean their hands, and their perspective on patient hand hygiene importance compared
with hospital staff, as well as their satisfaction or lack of satisfaction with hand
hygiene independence.
Results
Most of the participants (65, 60.7%) reported that prior to being admitted to the
hospital, they were able to maintain cleaning their hands with little or no difficulty.
During their admission, only 21 (19.6%) of the participants reported needing little
or no assistance. More than one-half of the participants, 34 (31.8%) and 23 (21.5%),
respectively, reported, mostly or completely agreeing that the hand hygiene of the
health care staff was more important than their own. Close to one-half of the participants
(50, 46.7%) reported not being satisfied at all with their ability to maintain their
hand hygiene in the hospital, whereas only 10 (9.3%) were very satisfied with their
ability to maintain hand hygiene.
Conclusions
Findings from this study will enhance our understanding of how to incorporate inpatient
hand hygiene into existing infection control programs in inpatient settings.
Key Words
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Article Info
Publication History
Published online: October 29, 2019
Footnotes
Funding/support: This publication was made possible by the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Cleveland ( KL2TR000440) from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, the NIH National Institute for Nursing Research ( T32NR015433-04) , and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not represent the official views of the NIH.
Conflicts of interest: C.J.D. has received research grants from GOJO, EcoLab, and Clorox.
Identification
Copyright
© 2019 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
