Patient empowerment begins with knowledge: consumer perceptions and knowledge sources for hand hygiene compliance...

A survey of 1,000 US consumers quantified their knowledge of health care worker hand hygiene compliance, their information sources on hand hygiene rates, and their past behavior of asking health care workers to perform hand hygiene. Sixty-nine percent of respondents believed compliance is above 50%; 17% of respondents had asked a health care worker to perform hand hygiene. Our findings suggest that an organized plan of disclosure about hand hygiene rates may be a way to empower through knowledge.