The Effectiveness of a Multicomponent Education Program of Hand Hygiene in Nursing Students: a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has posed serious threats to public health worldwide. Although children have mild symptoms, they have been found to more likely transmit the virus within the household than the other age groups. The importance of hand hygiene cannot be underestimated in both healthcare and community settings. The promotion of hand hygiene is the best practices in preventing health care-associated infection. It has been estimated that hand hygiene could reduce over 500000 attributable deaths per year. It was found that the annual economic impact of health care-associated infection in the US was approximately US$6.5 billion in 2004 and every US$1 spent on hand hygiene promotion could result in a US$23.7 benefit. Education plays a key role in setting a good practice base in hand hygiene.

The traditional training methods for nursing students include in-class lecture and practical, but students seldom receive individualized instructions and feedbacks due to limited manpower and facilities. Hence, there is an urgent need of designing an automated and individualized education program. This study aims to design and test a multicomponent education program of hand hygiene in nursing students. Specifically, this program has two components: 1) training videos according to the WHO guidelines on hand hygiene in health care; 2) a hand scanner used for students to immediately visualize the missing spots of hand hygiene.

If demonstrated effective, this program can be integrated into the curriculum of nursing students as an e-learning approach. In future, this system can also be used at point-of-care for real-time monitoring and audit of healthcare workers in other healthcare settings.

Subject recruitment