Hand hygiene product use by food employees in casual dining and quick-service restaurants

Hand hygiene product usage characteristics by food employees when hand sanitizers are made available are not well understood. To investigate hand hygiene product usage in casual dining and quick-service restaurants, we placed automated monitoring soap and sanitizer dispensers side-by-side at handwash sinks used by food employees in seven restaurants. Dispenses were monitored, and multiple dispenses that occurred within 60 s of each other were considered a single hand hygiene event. This resulted in 186,998 events during the study (149,779 soap only, 21 985 sanitizer only, and 15,234 regimen [defined as soap followed by sanitizer at the same sink within 60 s]) over 15,447 days of use. Soap was the most frequently used hand hygiene method by food employees in both restaurant types. Regimen use, despite being the preferred hand hygiene method by both restaurant chains, was the least used hand hygiene method. When pooled over restaurant types, the median daily usage for soap was statistically significantly highest of all methods at 23.5 dispenses per sink per day (p < 0.0001), the sanitizer median daily usage was 4.27 dispenses per sink per day, and regimen use was statistically significantly lowest of all methods at 4.02 dispenses per sink per day (p < 0.0001). When hand hygiene event types were pooled, casual dining restaurants had similar median hand hygiene event rates (11.4 dispenses per sink per day) compared to quick-service restaurants (11.9 dispenses per sink per day; p = 0.890). The number of events by sink location varied, with sinks located at a warewash station having the highest number of events (19.3 dispenses per sink per day; p < 0.0001), while sinks located by a ready-to-eat food preparation area had the lowest number of events (6.8 dispenses per sink per day; p < 0.0001). These data provide robust baseline benchmarks for future hand hygiene intervention studies in these settings.