Self perceived hand hygiene among student health professionals in a tertiary care teaching hospital in Southern India

Implementation of and adherence to practice of hand hygiene in a health care organization not only prevents health care-associated infections (HAI) but also limits the transmission of micro-organisms. With “Clean Care is Safer Care” as a main agenda of the global initiative taken by WHO on patient safety programs, it is time for developing countries to develop the much-needed policies for implementation of practices, which will prevent the basic infection in health care setups. The subjects involved in this study were assessed for knowledge and practice of hand hygiene. Interestingly, this study revealed that awareness & proper practice of hand hygiene was not satisfactory as the mean range of number of correct answers was 15–17 out of 28 questions. This was despite 83.3% of the sample having said that they got formal training in hand hygiene. The comparison of knowledge of the two groups showed that the nursing students were more knowledgeable than the MBBS students. There was a significant difference in the level of knowledge among Nursing and MBBS students as found in similar studies where the knowledge of Nursing students was better than that of MBBS students. Van de Mortel et al. in 2010 studied the hand hygiene knowledge, beliefs, and practices among nursing and medical students. They found that the knowledge of Nursing students was more than that of Medical students (P < 0.01), which is consistent with our study.