Hand hygiene compliance of respiratory physiotherapists: an analysis of trends over eight years including the COVID-19 pandemic period.

BACKGROUND

Respiratory physiotherapists (RPs) are an integral part of healthcare workers delivering care to intubated patients. Our study aimed to evaluate the effect of awareness campaigns on hand hygiene (HH) compliance among RPs.

METHOD

An observational single-center study was conducted between 2015 and 2022 in different ICU types in both adult and paediatric settings. The hand hygiene compliance rates were monitored prospectively and the quality improvement interventions included various hand hygiene campaigns and awareness sessions with RPs. Compliance was calculated as a percentage of events over total opportunities observed.

RESULTS

There was a significant increase in compliance rates for all five moments of HH (p value: <0.05). Overall, mean compliance rate in ICUs was significantly higher than wards for Moment 1 (p value: 0.0045), Moment 4 (p value: 0.0372) and Moment 5 (p value: 0.0036) by 24.2%, 22.7% and 21.5% respectively. Also, paediatric ICUs had higher HH compliance than adult ICUs for Moment 1 (87.5% vs 61.1%; p value: 0.0459) and Moment 4 (93.7% vs 79.3%; p value: 0.0255). A significant increase in HH compliance was observed in post-COVID-19 period compared to pre-COVID-19 period with respect to Moment 1, 2 and 5.

CONCLUSION

This study adds to the almost non-existent literature on this important category of healthcare workers working in respiratory ICUs. Our results project an increase compliance after the HH awareness programmes over the years among RP which is critical to prevent spread infection by multidrug resistant organisms among the hospitals.

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2024 Indian Association of Medical Microbiologists. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.