Study Finds Low Hand Sanitizer Use Linked to Inconvenience

According to a recent survey, five common factors, all related to inconvenience, prevent health care workers from properly following a facility’s hand hygiene protocols.

Late last year, GP PRO conducted proprietary research with health care clinicians on the hand hygiene compliance rate within their organization’s protocols for using alcohol-based hand sanitizer. The study found that the top five ranked reasons why workers didn’t follow protocols were:

• Emergencies requiring immediate attention (66% of respondents)
• A busy schedule or full workload (66%)
• Malfunctioning, broken, or empty hand sanitizer dispensers (51%)
• Hands being full and, therefore, unable to access a dispenser (50%)
• Difficulty sanitizing hands during glove-on/glove-off process (50%). 

“Lack of hand hygiene compliance primarily comes down to inconvenience,” said Ronnie Phillips, Ph.D., GP PRO’s health care division senior director of innovation. “These health care workers know their facility’s policy, and they want to follow that policy; but our research shows that the very nature of their jobs in combination with the nature of how hand sanitizer is made available to them prevents them from doing so.”