Systematic Review of Studies on Compliance with Hand Hygiene Guidelines in Hospital Care - Essay Example

As a nurse, it is my utmost desire to work harmoniously with my patients and colleagues in a holistic manner, and in effect, I decided to critically review this article not only to protect my patients, but for a higher aim of keeping myself and my colleagues away from this preventable and deadly hospital – acquired infection. Another reason that compels me to do this paper is the annual increase of mortality and mobility rate secondary to nosocomial infection as well as improper hand washing technique compliance among the healthcare personnel, in spite of massive campaign for proper hand washing practice.

Several campaigns that encourage proper hand hygiene practice were launched over the past decades, but compliance rates among the nursing staff in the hospital were not substantial, and have no lasting effect in preventing the spread of infection. This article was carefully chosen because it presented several data on hand hygiene compliance and guidelines on hand hygiene in the hospital set up. This paper was explored using the largest search engine in the internet to date, www.google.com. The keywords and terms used were hand hygiene, hospital care, compliance, non – compliance, journals, nosocomial infection, and hospital – acquired infection.

All journals published prior to January 2009 were integrated in the searches, and the best journal searched for in this study was downloaded and reviewed. Hand searches and checking of the articles were among the strategies utilized in searching the journals. An article on the systematic review of studies on compliance rate of hand hygiene guidelines in hospital care was reviewed to assess the prevalence rate of hospital – acquired infection and correlate it with the compliance and non – compliance rate of guidelines of hand hygiene in the hospital set up.

This paper aimed to improve successfully the rate of compliance using the behavioural sciences to follow a planned approach for the development of interventions in the future. Systematic reviews of 96 published empirical studies that were conducted to the general populations of developed countries were completed in this article. The process of searching databases starts with screening the title, abstracts, and entire article to ensure that the criteria in selecting the paper are met. Extraction and management of data followed with recapitulation of various findings in the study were made.

From this study, it was gathered that people with poor compliance rate were mostly from high activity group. This consist of physicians (having 32% compliance rate) followed by the nurses (with 48% compliance). From the article, it was noted that the compliance rate was much lower in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) with a rate ranging only from 30 – 40%. On the other hand, workers engaged with dirty tasks were those observed to have higher rate of compliance in hand hygiene. Because of incomplete details presented in the study, Erasmus, et al (2010) concluded that further research and monitoring of standard measures must be carried on in the next study, and to better explain the complexities of hand hygiene, theoretical models from behavioural sciences should be employed and adapted in the paper.

Erasmus et al. (2010) added that more research focusing on the determinants of behaviour is required