Social marketing: a behavior change technology for infection control

Changing health care worker behaviors is a core function of infection control programs. The social change technologies of education and institutional policy are limited in their capacity to achieve desired behaviors on a sustained basis because they do not address the importance of opportunity and ability in practice enhancement. Social marketing addresses the health care worker's lack of opportunity and ability by offering a bundle of benefits at low cost with high accessibility and by doing this better than the behavioral status quo. This article introduces some social marketing concepts and explicates them in the context of hand hygiene promotion.