What Effects Does Poor Hand Hygiene Have On Patients Within a Hospital Setting?

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What Effects Does Poor Hand Hygiene Have On Patients Within a Hospital Setting?

I was given a case study which involved me shadowing a nurse for the day and noticing that they did not wash their hands in between patient care. This nurse occasionally wore gloves, but used the same ones in between caring for different patients.

Initially I did not fully understand the importance of good hand washing techniques, although I did know that it can lead to infections.

In order for me to formulate the question which I have chosen, I firstly performed a literature search using the key term from the case study, which I decided was hand hygiene. This brought up a wide range of articles, most of which were mentioning the importance of hand hygiene, infection control and hospital acquired infections. These key words, along with the case study aided me in the formulation of my question. In order to answer my question effectively, I decided to use knowledge and Evidence to support me in finding an answer to the question.

Knowledge and Evidence is important when answering questions such as the one I have formulated, because it provides reliable proof, usually in the form of carefully thought out planning and legitimate, credible research. Polit and Beck (2008) wrote that Evidence Based Practice (EBP) is using the best clinical evidence, to make the best decisions regarding a patient's care. They also say that evidence comes from the research done by nurses and other health care professionals. Therefore, In order to find the correct Knowledge and Evidence to support me, I am going to be using literature searches and the university library to find reliable clinical evidence and research to grasp a good knowledge of the issue regarding my question. I decided to use Cinahl and internurse to support me, as from my own personal experiences of using these engines, I believe that they are the best.

As I began my search, I firstly decided to use Cinahl to aid me in finding some relevant evidence to suggest what effects poor hand hygiene have on patients. I used the search terms "hand hygiene", "patient" and "infection". This search brought up 238 results, most of which were very old journals and some did not have relevant information. So before I continued, I decided to narrow my search results. I did this by going to the refine search terms button and by tweaking the search settings. I ticked the full text box and changed the publication year from 1995 to 2010 to 2000 to 2010. I was also on the lookout for articles and journals which had been peer reviewed because it is believed that peer reviewed articles are usually of good quality and credible. This search brought up 18 results, upon looking through them, I realised that once again, the results were not very relevant, this time because they were from different countries and lacked the appropriate information which I required. The one thing that I did notice is that quite a few of the results kept mentioning infection control. So I decided to use this term to refine my search once again, but this time I decided to use internurse and would return to cinahl later.

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        Once again I searched for "hand hygiene" but this time I added "infection control "and "hospital acquired infections" to my search, and changed the dates to 2000 to 2010. The results which Internurse were of more relevance than Cinahl. So i reviewed several articles from Internurse which I though were the best, and then i went back to Cinahl and use the refined search terms to find some good articles to use and compare with Internurse. Using the refined search terms and the same advanced search settings which I had previously used which was relevant to assisting me in finding ...

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