Comparison study of hand-wash rate of medical personnel before and after automatic hand-wash detector usage in medical intensive care unit, King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital
Abstract:
Background: Healthcare-associated infections in healthcare facilities affect patient safety and can sometimes lead to significant complications and even death. Hand hygiene has been emphasized as an important measure to prevent the spread of infections among patients. However, compliance with hand hygiene is still considered below acceptable thresholds. Methods: This study utilized a quasi-experimental design to compare hand hygiene compliance among HCWs before and after the implementation of these systems. As an initial evaluation of the system, we conducted the experiment to compare the hand hygiene compliance measured by the system with direct observation by health personnel. After system installation and test, we performed a pre-intervention phase to measure baseline rates of hand hygiene episodes using the real-time location system (RTLS). Results: The sensitivity and specificity of the system that captured hand hygiene actions were 85.19% (95%CI 75.71-94.88%) and 92% (95%CI 84.48-99.52%), respectively. During the study period, a total of 30 participants were included. All were either nurses (n=21) or nurse assistants (n=9) working in the medical ICU. After installing the system, hand hygiene compliance without real-time feedback and alarm was observed, and the results showed that the mean hand hygiene compliance rate before patient contact was 56.19% (95%CI, 52.04-60.43%), while the rate after patient contact was 71.03% (95%CI, 67.67-74.44%). Comparing these rates with previous studies, we found that system-measured hand hygiene rates were higher, with a mean difference of 5.19% (95%CI, 0.69-9.70%, p=0.025) and 20.03% (95%CI, 16.58-23.48%, p<0.001). When we compared these rates with participants self- estimated hand hygiene compliance, we found that system-measured hand hygiene rates were lower, with a mean difference of 16.31% (95%CI, 10.28-22.33%, p<0.001) and 18.97% (95%CI, 13.82-24.12%, p<0.001) before patient contact and after patient contact, respectively. Conclusions: The preliminary results showed that the system based on ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) can replace human observers. The system can increase the mean hand hygiene compliance rate of medical personnel compared to previous studies. Further ongoing phases of the study will be necessary to determine whether the use of the monitoring system can effectively improve hand hygiene compliance in HCWs.