Why Hand Hygiene In Health Care Is Important

The idea of hand washing is always rejected by the medical community. Doctors get offended by the suggestion that they could be causing infections.
However, evidences suggest otherwise.

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian-born doctor came to Vienna in 1846 to work at the city’s General Hospital. Semmelweis noticed that women delivered by doctors had three times higher mortality rate than women delivered by midwives. He spotted a link between the lack of hygiene of the doctors and the mortality rate of the mothers.

It seems doctors have ignored this important discovery.

Hand washing and maintaining proper hygiene have been advocated as a simple way of reducing the risk of infection. But, studies find that doctors still do not wash their hands often.

A systematic review of studies on compliance with hand hygiene in hospitals, done by researchers Vicki Erasmus et al, found that only 32% of doctors and 48% of nurses wash their hands between seeing patients.

Another study by researcher Didier Pittet, an infection control expert with the University of Geneva Hospitals, Switzerland found that compliance rates for hand washing amongst doctors and nurses was only 57%, and years of awareness programmes had little effect. A study amongst Indian doctors by researchers S. K. Ansari et al, found that only 49% of doctors and 56% of nurses washed their hands with soap between patients.

If India needs to contain the spread of COVID-19, doctors and nurses will have to be educated about changing their behavior. Even though doctors and nurses know that they should be washing their hands, they forget to do so. That’s why we need to apply behavioural design.