14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers are not so happy to announce that, having carried out an investigation into how healthcare workers in the US behave on the job, they have found that most of them tend not to wash their hands if nobody is watching.
The findings of this investigation carried out by specialists with the Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa in the US are detailed in a paper in SHEA's journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.
The method
Looking to determine just how fond of proper hand hygiene healthcare workers in the US are while on the job, the researchers spent some time monitoring several physicians, nurses, and critical care staff employed by the University of Iowa Hospital.
The focus was on how much effort these people put into cleaning their hands prior to entering a patient's room and after leaving to tend to other business. The specialists documented over 47,000 situations when hand washing was in order.
As detailed in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, these 47,000 so-called hand hygiene opportunities were documented while keeping a close eye on the physicians, nurses, and critical care staff around the clock for a period of time of 10 days.
The findings
Information obtained while observing healthcare workers at the University of Iowa Hospital revealed that staff here were more likely to wash their hands when not alone. Thus, the specialists documented a 7% higher hand hygiene rate (28% vs. 21%) when the workers were accompanied by others.
The researchers also found that, although having more colleagues around boosted the chances for a healthcare worker to wash their hands when entering and exiting a patient's room, this association was only valid up to a point. Otherwise put, those dead set on not washing their hands could not care less if they had 1 or 1,000 colleagues around.
The importance of this study
In their paper, the University of Iowa specialists behind this research project argue that proper hand hygiene is especially important among healthcare workers due to the fact that, in hospital settings, these people can really make a difference when it comes to preventing the spread of various diseases.
The scientists recommend that the social environments in hospitals be studied in further detail, and that efforts be made to figure out how to use the way healthcare workers interact with one another to keep improper hand hygiene from fueling the spread of one disease or another.
“Healthcare workers' proximity to their peers had a positive effect on their hand hygiene adherence,” study author Philip Polgreen said in a statement. Furthermore, “Social network effects, or peer effects, have been associated with smoking, obesity, happiness and worker productivity. As we found, this influence extends to hand hygiene compliance, too.”