Examining the Importance of Hand Hygiene Policy and Patient Safety Culture on Improving Healthcare Workers' Adherence to Hand Hygiene Practice in Critical Care Settings in the Sultanate of Oman: A Scoping Review.

Abstract

Several studies suggest that adherence to hand hygiene (HH) policy would be enhanced by improving the culture of safety in an organization. This could be achieved through continuous awareness programs about the dramatic effect of HH practice according to the HH policy on improving patient safety and quality care. Understanding the importance and purposes of HH policy by healthcare workers would allow them to prioritize HH policy in their planning. Therefore, healthcare leaders should be responsible and accountable for strengthening their healthcare system by improving infrastructure, providing adequate support and resources, providing comprehensive monitoring and evaluation of patient safety initiatives, monitoring adherence to the regional Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and local Oman HH policy and using World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for patient safety and HH as a basis for providing safer care. This should involve HH policy as a basic and mandatory program during an internship or in new staff orientation programs, spending enough resources on conducting more research studies and benchmarking findings with other international countries or any other organization such as WHO or Centres for Disease Control (CDC). The development of an HH policy at three different levels, macro, meso, and micro, is discussed in this article. In this sense, patient safety and quality care are the most important issues when adopting any policy.