Highlights
- •Monitoring hand hygiene behavior of individual nurses is not routinely performed
- •We tested whether an anonymous monitoring system could estimate individual behavior
- •We found a link between a patient room's hand hygiene rate and its assigned nurse
- •An anonymous monitoring system can estimate individual staff hand hygiene behavior
Abstract
Background: We investigated whether an anonymous automated electronic monitoring system (EMS)
could be used to compare hand hygiene (HH) performance of individual nurses.
Methods: Prospective observational cohort study. HH performance in 10 acute-care patient
rooms was estimated through an EMS that anonymously measured HH events, and room entries
and exits. The association between patient room's HH compliance and the nurse in charge
of each room was investigated by comparing percentile rank distributions, and through
a negative binomial model.
Results: Over 99 days, there were 38,596 HH events and 135,546 room entries and exits (global
HH performance, 28%). For 10/54 (19%) nurses, the median HH percentile rank of the
rooms to which they were assigned was higher than the group average (p<0.001; range
of percentiles, 64th to 85th). A lower median percentile was seen in 9/54 (17%) participants (p<0.001; range of
percentiles, 22nd to 39th). The negative binomial model confirmed this association and identified 15/54 high
performers (range of adjusted incidence rate ratios [aIRR], 1.17-1.83) and 16/54 low
performers (range of aIRR, 0.37-0.77).
Discussion and Conclusions: An association exists between a room's HH rate and its assigned nurse. This association
could hold potential value for an individualized feedback strategy.
Keywords
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Article Info
Publication History
Publication stage
In Press Journal Pre-ProofFootnotes
Potential conflicts of interest. YL reported receiving research grants from Becton Dickinson and Merck. All other authors report no conflicts of interest relevant to this article.
Preliminary results from this study were presented at ID Week 2019 (abstract number 1187).
Identification
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© 2022 Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc.
