Infrastructure for hand hygiene in a teaching hospital

To evaluate the hospital infrastructure and the knowledge of the coordinators about the unit structure for hand hygiene.

Descriptive cross-sectional design study carried out in a teaching hospital in the South of Brazil, in the period between December 2016 and January 2017. Eighteen inpatient care units were evaluated, and 16 coordinators were interviewed. We used the questionnaire of the World Health Organization multimodal strategy on the structure of the units for hand hygiene. It was used descriptive statistics.

All the units had alcohol-based sanitizers, and 93.8% of the dispensers were substituted when they got empty. The difficulties observed were the lack of illustrating posters, the location of sinks and dispensers of alcohol-based hand sanitizers in some nursing infirmarys, and the fact that there were few dispensers at hand reach near the patient's bed.

We concluded that there were protocols for hand hygiene, and professionals were instructed about it. There were gaps in the inpatient units, such as the presence of inadequate sinks and taps.