Alcohol based rub improves hand hygiene compliance

8th of August 2018
Alcohol based rub improves hand hygiene compliance

A study recently published in Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control has examined the effect of alcohol-based surgical hand rub on the quality and duration of the procedure as well as on surgical site infection prevention.

Researchers conducted a study at a tertiary-care university hospital in the US from April 1 2017 to November 1 2017. They studied 56 cardiac and orthopedic surgical teams and 231 patients who underwent surgical procedures.

Alcohol based hand rubs were made available in the operating theatre; effort was made to convince and train surgical teams in using it; direct observation of surgical hand preparation was promoted; and aggregated feedback on the quality of the preparation was provided.

Researchers studied 534 surgical hand preparation events. For the 33 participants with full data available, they observed full compliance with all the steps predicted in the WHO technique in 0.03 per cent of the events in the pre-intervention period and in 36.36 per cent of the events in the intervention period.

Additionally, the duration of the hand preparation was 2.7 minutes in the intervention period,compared to 4.8 minutes in the pre-intervention period. However, the individual risk of developing an SSI did not significantly change between the pre-intervention and the intervention phase.

 

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