Now released in The Journal of Hospital Infection is a timely interventional study titled the “Effectiveness of an electronic hand hygiene monitoring system to increase compliance and reduce healthcare-associated infections.” The study was a collaboration between researchers and frontline healthcare workers in Denmark.
According to the Journal’s summary:
“In the study held in a nephrology department, researchers investigated the effect of an electronic hand hygiene monitoring system (Sani NudgeTM) on the hand hygiene compliance of healthcare workers (n=99) and hospital-acquired bloodstream infections.
The doctors and nurses improved their hand hygiene compliance significantly during the intervention phase when receiving group and individual feedback based on actionable insights from the electronic hand hygiene monitoring system. The improvements in hand hygiene compliance were associated with a significant reduction in hospital-acquired bloodstream infections.”
Key findings of the study showed that doctors and nurses had significant improvement in their hand hygiene compliance, more than doubling from the baseline period to the period when they received individual feedback.
The most prominent finding of the study was found in Infection Prevention and Control interventions, where the intervention periods showed a significantly lower number of healthcare-associated bloodstream infections by using the electronic hand hygiene monitoring system.
Additionally, it is worth noting that this study suggests that there are measurable cost savings for a healthcare institution associated with the reduction of these infections, as attributed to the work of Guest et al. [1]
[1] Guest JF, Keating T, Gould D, Wigglesworth N. Modelling the costs and consequences of reducing healthcare-associated infections by improving hand hygiene in an average hospital in England. BMJ Open 2019;9:e029971. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-029971.
