Introduction: Rate of developing hospital acquired infection (HAIs)in both developing and developed countries still high in the modern medicine world. Hand hygiene (HH) is the effective method to minimize the rate of HAIs. It is usually neglected in hospital setting. The present aimed to evaluate the awareness, attitude of HH among healthcare workers and stimulate the improvement in HH practices by using various tools and methodologies.

Materials and Methods: This study was conducted in a tertiary care teaching hospital, Kolhapur, India from June 2018 to August 2018. The study included three phases i) Pre-intervention Phase, ii) Intervention Phase and iii) Post- intervention Phase. A total of 70 Health-care workers (HCWs) were included. Knowledge of Hand-washing from HCWs was evaluated by using direct observation and survey was conducted by using Semi-structured questionnaire.

Results: A total of 9600 opportunities were recorded by direct observation from post and pre-intervention phases. Over all hand hygiene rate (HHAR) in post and Pre-intervention phase was found to be 35.40% and 86.27% respectively. Hand Hygiene Complete Adherence rate (HHCAR) was highest among the by Nurses (64.56%) followed physicians (61.54%), resident doctors (52.28%) and Interns (46.39%) from post- intervention phases. Overall knowledge, attitude and awareness of Hand Hygiene (HH) from HCWs after intervention phase were evaluated by using semi structured questionnaire.   We found overall score of 84.28% was good. Of these, Physicians (91.66%) had better knowledge about HH followed by Nurses (87.5%), Interns (81.25%) and Resident doctors (77.77%).

Conclusion: Significant improvement in HH compliance from baseline pre-intervention (35.40%) to post-intervention (86.27%) can be achieved by conducting world HH day, creating awareness, regular meetings, discussion, visual modalities in hospitals, increasing staff rotations, regular internal audits and feedback.

Keywords: HHAR, HHCAR, HAIs.

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Dr Roma A Chougale

Professor and Head of Microbiology, D.Y Patil Medical College, Kolhapur, India