Hand Washing Practices among Admitted Patients In Tertiary Level Hospital

Abstract

Hand washing is one of the most important steps to prevent and control the spread of diseases. Many studies have been conducted on hand hygiene practices among the health care professionals, but there are dearth of evidences amongst the patients and their care givers. The current study was carried out with the objective to assess the hand washing practices amongst the admitted patients. The study was carried out at general wards of Nehru Hospital, PGIMER, Chandigarh. A non-participatory observation technique was adopted to collect the data. A checklist was used to assess the hand washing practices of 200 patients over a period of 10 days. Patients were observed for duration of six hours per day. Socio-demographic data of patients was recorded from their hospital records. Majority of the study subjects were between the age group of 40–60 yrs with mean age 43.18±16.38 and range was 12–77 years. Most of them were males. Only 35.5% of the patients utilized hand washing opportunities. The various opportunities for washing hands were before eating meals, after eating meals, before taking medicine, when visibly dirty, after touching infected wound, after touching body fluids, after changing soiled clothes and before taking snacks. More than half (60.5%) did not wash their hands at all. Most (98.5%) of the patients were having accessibility to the hand washing sources. Only 3.5% of the study subjects had exposure to prior information regarding steps of hand washing. The study concludes that only 35.5% of the total study subjects washed their hands when opportunities were available. Most of the study subjects had poor knowledge regarding hand washing practices, specially the steps of hand washing. Hence, there is a need to upgrade the knowledge of patients to minimize the spread of infection.