Improving Hand Hygiene Compliance Among Dental Health Workers

Hand hygiene (i.e., washing hands with soap and water, or disinfection using alcohol- based hand rub) remains the single most important measure of preventing the spread of antimicrobial resistant pathogens and subsequent nosocomial infection. While it is clear that clean hands help to protect patients and health care workers themselves, still there is poor compliance of health workers towards hand washing.This change project proposed to improve hand hygiene compliance among dental health care workers in three dental clinics in Khartoum State, the Sudan, following the implementation of WHO Hand Hygiene implementation multimodal improvement strategy and applying the HSE change model. The project include increasing compliance to hand washing, as well as introducing another simple, quick and effective procedure of hand hygiene which is using alcohol hand rub. Doctors were found to have a better compliance to hand hygiene compared to nurses in all the assessment periods, which might reflect the need to intervene further specifically for nurses thus warranting the issue with further study and analysis.