Hand hygiene has dropped off since the early days of the pandemic, and it seems that inconvenience may to be blame.
That’s the key conclusion of a recent study from GP PRO which found that five common factors, all related to inconvenience, tend to prevent healthcare 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 organization’s protocols for using alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
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 (also 66 per cent)
- Malfunctioning, broken, or empty hand sanitizer dispensers (51 per cent)
- Hands being full and, therefore, unable to access a dispenser (50 per cent)
- Difficulty sanitizing 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 healthcare division senior director of innovation.
“These healthcare 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 sanitizer is made available to them prevents them from doing so.”
There are some evident conclusions to draw from this research.
While not much can be done about the distraction of emergencies in hospitals and care facilities, employers can look to avoid over-burdening employees with their schedules or workloads to allow for more time to follow important hand hygiene protocols.
Perhaps most importantly and easily, ensure that hand sanitizers are plentifully distributed around facilities and are well-maintained and checked frequently to avoid breakage or inadequate supply of sanitizer would go a long way to easing this issue.
