Table of Contents
Research question
How can hand hygiene compliance at the hospital among health workers contribute to minimizing rates of hospital-acquired infections in the next one year, as against a noncompliant hand hygiene culture?
Population: The study’s population is health workers. This group has been selected due to the chances they have in coming into direct contact with patients and contaminants as part of their line of duty. The health workers to be targeted are adults whose age range from 22 to 65 and are in full time work. They will comprise people from both sexes and are believed to have a lot of experience in patient care. Their experiences would be expected to range from 1 year to 20 years.
Intervention: The intervention designed for the study is hand hygiene compliance. Hand hygiene is a common practice in most health facilities (Akbari & Kjellerup, 2015). Regrettably however, it has not always been the case that the practice is enforced through a culture of compliance. Where there is no compliance, people would do away with the practice and go away free without someone questioning their action. The intervention therefore seeks to create a new culture and work attitude, where hand hygiene is not an option or choice but is compulsory.
Comparison: In comparison to the intervention, the study will be using a noncompliant hand hygiene culture, where the decision to maintain hand hygiene will be by choice for health workers. It is expected that there would be a control group who will be using this alternative to the intervention. For example two health facilities can be compared. One of the facilities will be having a hand hygiene complaint culture, whereas the other will be having the comparison of noncompliant hand hygiene culture.
Outcome: The outcome of the study as reflected in the research question focuses on minimizing rates of hospital infections. Hospital infections continues to be a growing issue of concern in the medical practice (Leung & Chan, 2006). The case has been worse, particularly in instances of infection among health workers (Katz, 2004). It is for this reason that the health workers were made the population of the study. The outcome is therefore expected to be recorded directly among the health workers if they heed to the intervention of hand hygiene compliance, which has been identified for the study.
Time: measuring the impact of an intervention such as hand hygiene compliance is a process rather than an event. That is, it will take some time to be able to ascertain the actual impact of the intervention on the outcome. This is particularly the case as there ought to be a window period where even those currently reporting with hospital infection cases can fully recover. For this reason, the time frame set for the study is 4 months. Within this period, it is expected that enough data would be collected to justify the actual outcome of the study.
- Akbari, F. & Kjellerup, B. (2015). Elimination of Bloodstream Infections Associated with Candida albicans Biofilm in Intravascular Catheters. Pathogens 4 (3), 457–469.
- Katz, J. D. (2004). Hand washing and hand disinfection: more than your mother taught you. Anesthesiol Clin North America 22 (3), 457–71
- Leung, M. & Chan, A. H. (2006). Control and management of hospital indoor air quality. Med. Sci. Monit. 12 (3), SR17–23.