Hand Hygiene Compliance Study at a Large Central Hospital in Vietnam.

Cam Le,Erik Lehman,Timothy Craig,Thanh Nguyen

doi:10.3390/ijerph16040607

Abstract

Lack of proper hand hygiene among healthcare workers has been identified as a core facilitator of hospital-acquired infections. Although the concept of hand hygiene quality assurance was introduced to Vietnam relatively recently, it has now become a national focus in an effort to improve the quality of care. Nonetheless, barriers such as resources, lack of education, and cultural norms may be limiting factors for this concept to be properly practiced. Our study aimed to assess the knowledge and attitude of healthcare workers toward hand hygiene and to identify barriers to compliance, as per the World Health Organization’s guidelines, through surveys at a large medical center in Vietnam. In addition, we aimed to evaluate the compliance rate across different hospital departments and the roles of healthcare workers through direct observation. Results showed that, in general, healthcare workers had good knowledge of hand hygiene guidelines, but not all believed in receiving reminders from patients. The barriers to compliance were identified as: limited resources, patient overcrowding, shortage of staff, allergic reactions to hand sanitizers, and lack of awareness. The overall compliance was 31%; physicians had the lowest rate of compliance at 15%, while nurses had the highest rate at 39%; internal medicine had the lowest rate at 16%, while the intensive care unit had the highest rate at 40%. In summary, it appears that addressing cultural attitudes in addition to enforcing repetitive quality assurance and assessment programs are needed to ensure adherence to safe hand washing.

Highlights

Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) are regarded as the most frequent threat to patient safety globally [1]
Surveys were given to the head nurse of each service, who distributed the surveys to the rest of the healthcare workers within the service
Healthcare workers demonstrated a knowledgeable response regarding the timing of hand hygiene performance and its association with hospital-acquired infections, which is consistent with the World Health Organization (WHO)’s education (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) are regarded as the most frequent threat to patient safety globally [1]. Lack of hand hygiene has been identified as the core facilitator of HAIs. Studies show that healthcare workers only perform hand hygiene less than half as often as they should [3]. Many studies have been conducted to investigate the factors contributing to hand hygiene compliance and indicate that lack of compliance is a concern in hospital settings. Limited data are collected from developing countries, where resources may be sparse and other emerging health problems and diseases take priority over a surveillance system for HAIs [1]. Hand hygiene compliance education in healthcare settings is a new concept in Vietnam, and the country only

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Discussion

Conclusion