ArticleInternal and emergency medicine2022
A nudge intervention to improve hand hygiene compliance in the hospital.
Article in Internal and emergency medicine, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Patient Hand Hygiene Before Meals: A Systematic Review.Journal of nursing care qualityPooled it
- Application of the behaviour-centred design to understand facilitators and deterrents of hand hygiene among healthcare providers: findings from a formative phase of a cluster randomised trial in the Kampala Metropolitan area.BMC health services research · 2024Trial
- ATP Bioluminescence Feedback Is Associated with Reduced Residual Hand Contamination Among Healthcare Workers: A Single-Center Before-and-After Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Methicillin-ResistantMicroorganisms · 2026Review
- The Use of Infographics to Inform Infection Prevention and Control Nursing Practice: A Descriptive Qualitative Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Effect of Nudge Interventions in Real-World Kiosks on Consumer Beverage Choices to Promote Non-Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption.Nutrients · 2025Article
- Bodily waste management and related hygiene practices in nursing homes of Vaud: findings from a multicentre cross-sectional survey as a basis for targeted interventions.Antimicrobial resistance and infection control · 2025Article
- Distribution and characteristics of bacteria on the hand during oropharyngeal swab collection: Which handwashing points are affected?Journal of clinical nursing · 2024Observational
- The Feasibility of AgileNudge+ Software to Facilitate Positive Behavioral Change: Mixed Methods Design.JMIR formative research · 2024Article
- Effectiveness of A Nurse-Led Multimodal Intervention in Preventing Blood Culture Contamination: A Before-and-After Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Process Evaluation of an Acute-Care Nurse-Centred Hand Hygiene Intervention in US Hospitals.Evaluation review · 2024Article
- Assessing Hand Sanitizer Usage in Japanese Elderly Day Care Centers: An Observational and Interventional Study.Cureus · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Hand hygiene among professionals plays a crucial role in preventing healthcare-associated infections, yet poor compliance in hospital settings remains a lasting reason for concern. Nudge theory is an innovative approach to behavioral change first developed in economics and cognitive psychology, and recently spread and discussed in clinical medicine. To assess a combined nudge intervention (localized dispensers, visual reminders, and gain-framed posters) to promote hand hygiene compliance among hospital personnel. A quasi-experimental study including a pre-intervention phase and a post-intervention phase (9 + 9 consecutive months) with 117 professionals overall from three wards in a 350-bed general city hospital. Hand hygiene compliance was measured using direct observations by trained personnel and measurement of alcohol-based hand-rub consumption. Levels of hand hygiene compliance were low in the pre-intervention phase: 11.44% of hand hygiene opportunities prescribed were fulfilled overall. We observed a statistically significant effect of the nudge intervention with an increase to 18.71% (p < 0.001) in the post-intervention phase. Improvement was observed in all experimental settings (the three hospital wards). A statistical comparison across three subsequent periods of the post-intervention phase revealed no significant decay of the effect. An assessment of the collected data on alcohol-based hand-rub consumption indirectly confirms the main result in all experimental settings. Behavioral outcomes concerning hand hygiene in the hospital are indeed affected by contextual, nudging factors to a significant extent. If properly devised, nudging measures can provide a sustainable contribution to increase hand hygiene compliance in a hospital setting.
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Registered trials
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