Handwashing In Nursing

Performance of hand hygiene by health professionals and visitors of hospitals has been shown to be essential when preventing the transfer of infections to patients receiving treatment in healthcare facilities(). Several studies have implemented different approaches to increase handwashing behaviors in workers and visitors of hospitals however, many of these implementations do not significantly improve an individual’s likelihood to perform hand hygiene. One idea that has been shown to increase the likelihood of one to perform tasks is the effects of cues in the environment(). This idea, also known as priming, can alter an individual’s behavior when they encounter to a primer prior to performing the task. In this study, researchers sought to determine if the …show more content…
Participants included both healthcare providers and visitors of the SICU during the time that trials were conducted(). Data was collected by two individuals, one person was situated on each side of the entrance to the SICU so that data included people entering the unit and patients’ rooms (). Observations were taken in 3 hour intervals at twelve different occasions with twenty-four hours in between each interval (). Observers were looking to see if individuals performed hand hygiene in the time they entered the SICU until they went into a patient’s room and wrote whether each individual did or did not perform the task (). In the olfactory primer group, a clean scent was introduced to the area of the study and was allowed to distribute prior to the interval (). In the visual primer group, half of the intervals had a picture of male eyes above the dispenser while the other half had a picture of female eyes(). A control group who did not have an environmental cue was also used(). Therefore, male eyes/female eyes, clean scent or no cue were the independent variables and the dependent variable were whether individuals washed their hands