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Hand hygiene compliance: exploring variations in practice between hospitals
1School of Nursing and Midwifery, University College Cork, Ireland.
Background:
The issue of 'centre' or 'hospital' as an independent variable has not been studied extensively in healthcare workers' hand-hygiene practices.
Aim:
To investigate healthcare workers' compliance with hand-hygiene guidelines in four acute-care hospitals in Ireland and to examine factors that contributed to non-compliance.
Method:
Data collectors observed healthcare workers in four hospitals.
Results:
Data (n = 1,737 observations) was drawn from a random sample of nurses, doctors, physiotherapists and HCAs (n = 280 staff). Findings revealed that the individual hospital has a significant impact. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed healthcare workers in centre 4 had a significantly higher likelihood of non-compliance than those in all other centres (p = 0.003), irrespective of gender, discipline or area of work.
Conclusion:
The findings make an important contribution to the study of healthcare workers' hand-hygiene behaviour and control of healthcare-associated infections. A possible explanation of the results may be related to variations in organisational support and hospital culture.
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