OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of a multimodal hand hygiene intervention program in reducing health care insurance claims for hygiene preventable infections (eg, cold and influenza), absenteeism, and subjective impact on employees. METHODS A 13.5-month prospective, randomized cluster controlled trial was executed with alcohol-based hand sanitizer in strategic wo...

Background Improving hand hygiene in hospitals is the most efficient method to prevent healthcare-associated infections. The behavior of hospital patients and visitors not well-researched, although they pose a risk for transmission pathogens. Therefore, present study had three aims: (1) Finding suitable theoretical model explain patients’ visitors’ practice; (2) Identifying important predictors...

Last year marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Ignaz Semmelweis’ landmark monograph on hand hygiene – at the time hand disinfection with chlorinated lime solution – as a means to prevent nosocomial infections [1]. All the necessary scientific evidence that improved hand hygiene practices in healthcare indeed reduce healthcare-associated infections and patient-to-patient transmissi...

To quantify the effect of hand-hygiene interventions on rates of gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses and to identify interventions that provide the greatest efficacy, we searched 4 electronic databases for hand-hygiene trials published from January 1960 through May 2007 and conducted meta-analyses to generate pooled rate ratios across interventions (N=30 studies). Improvements in hand hy...

Editorial The 1st World Health Organization (WHO) Global Patient Safety Challenge, " Clean Care is Safer Care " , was launched in October 2005. Since then, Prof Didier Pittet, the External Programme Lead reported that 131 WHO Member States and autonomous areas have pledged their support. As of May 2013, over 15,700 healthcare facilities with more than 9 million healthcare workers (HCWs), and mo...