Educational technologies for teaching hand hygiene: Systematic review

To gather available scientific evidence on technologies used to teach hand hygiene to professional populations and lays involved in health care in the hospital setting. This systematic review was designed as proposed by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis, included studies reporting primary, original, quantitative research findings with no date limit and written in English, Spanish or Portuguese. The search was performed in the following electronic databases: Cochrane Library, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Excerpta Medica dataBASE, Literatura Latino-Americana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde, US National Library of Medicine, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar and ProQuest. The eligibility criteria were applied independently by two reviewers to select the studies, first by reading the titles and abstracts on the Rayyan platform and then by full text reading of the eligible studies. After a descriptive analysis, the studies were subjected to critical evaluation of their methodological quality using JBI tools.

Seven studies were included, addressing various methods for teaching hand hygiene using different technological resources, such as audiovisual electronic devices, videos, virtual reality, and gamification using tablets and smartphones, in different populations.

Using technologies to teach hand hygiene considerably helps patients, visitors, and relatives in learning the procedures and efficiently improves hand hygiene compliance rates among healthcare professionals, creating evidence-based repetitive learning opportunities for patients and caregivers.