Five common factors prevent health care workers from properly following a facility’s hand hygiene protocols, study finds.

According to a recent survey, five common factors, all related to inconvenience, prevent health care workers from properly following a facility’s hand hygiene protocols.

Late last year, GP PRO conducted proprietary research with health care clinicians on the hand hygiene compliance rate within their organisation’s protocols for using alcohol-based hand sanitiser.

The study found that the top five ranked reasons why workers didn’t follow protocols were:

Emergencies requiring immediate attention (66 per cent of respondents)
A busy schedule or full workload (66 per cent)
Malfunctioning, broken, or empty hand sanitiser dispensers (51 per cent)
Hands being full and, therefore, unable to access a dispenser (50 per cent)
Difficulty sanitising hands during glove-on/glove-off process (50 per cent).

“Lack of hand hygiene compliance primarily comes down to inconvenience,” said Ronnie Phillips, Ph.D., GP PRO’s health care division senior director of innovation.

“These health care workers know their facility’s policy, and they want to follow that policy; but our research shows that the very nature of their jobs in combination with the nature of how hand sanitiser is made available to them prevents them from doing so.”

This article was first published by ISSA News. Read the original article here.

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