Researchers introduced trained covert observers to a hospital during clinical rotations and compared hand hygiene compliance rates they observed to those gathered by overt auditors.
They found that covert observation produced lower compliance rates than overt observation during the same time period, 50 percent versus 83.67 percent.
Additionally, researchers found that physicians’ compliance difference between overt and covert observers was 19 percent (73.2 percent versus 54.2 percent), while for nurses it was much higher, at 40.7 percent (85.8 percent versus 45.1 percent).
“Our study suggest that traditional HH audits not only overstate HH performance overall, but can lead to inaccurate inferences about performance by professional groupings due to relative differences in the Hawthorne effect,” the authors concluded.
More articles on hand hygiene:
Electronic hand hygiene-monitoring system cut MRSA HAI rates by 42 percent
Freakonomics author: Get ‘crafty’ to gather hand hygiene data, drive improvement
Which factor is associated with hand hygiene compliance — age or physician specialty?
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