Incoporating hand hygiene in medical training courses

Hand hygiene is one of the most important methods to reduce healthcare associated infection. Accurate hand hygiene compliance will help to promote hand hygiene campaign. There were significant differences between hand hygiene compliance when observation was made in public or in private. To recruit medical students to become hand hygiene observer has at least two advantages. First, medical students would be even more familiar with hand hygiene and are expected to influence others in the future. Second, they can observe hand hygiene in healthcare workers in private, which would provide moer accurate hand hygiene compliance. In the project, we plan to set up how to train medical students as hand hygiene observers. By the end of December 2013, we expected to have at least 130 student observers and observed at least 41600 hand hygiene opportunities. We will compare the differences between hand hygiene compliance observed in public and in private, in order to better recognize the Hawthorne effect in hand hygiene. At the same time, hand hygiene lessons would be introduced in the basic training courses for interns and PGY doctors. Through the project we hope to deepen the hand hygiene campaingn in our hospital.