Assessment of hand hygiene practices among health care workers and different modalities used by them to follow hand hygiene

AIM: 1. To study the adherence of physicians and other paramedical staff to hand hygiene while attending the patients. 2. To study different modalities used by them for maintaining hand hygiene. 3. To study the beliefs and perceptions of physicians about hand hygiene. Material and Methods: Cross-sectional study on 80 participants-40 doctors and 40 nurses, selected by simple random sampling, total 960 observations of hand washing opportunities according to the CDC guidelines,12 on each participant in 4 departments medicine, surgery, casualty and C.C.U. Observations were made without their knowledge and then a questionnaire was filled by them. Statistical analysis: Wilcox on rank-sum test and Kruskal-wallis rank tests were used for the analysis of the data. Results: Overall adherence was 13.75 %.there was significant difference in adherence of surgery and other 3 departments, maximum in surgery (27.92%) but they didn’t differ much with respect to each other. Also acc. to questionnaire adherence was more if a bed side hand rub solution was present (15% against 5%). No significant difference w.r.t. age, sex, duration of work, pocket hand rub was found. Modalities used were- soap water>sterilium>both. Conclusion: Overall adherence is low; although more in surgery than other departments, it is still low. Increasing the availability of a bedside hand rub solution can increase adherence.