Meeting abstract
KNOWLEDGE AND OPINIONS OF PATIENTS ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF PERFORMING HAND HYGIENE IN HOSPITAL
Romana Panežić
; General County Hospital Požega, Osječka 107, Požega, Croatia
Božica Lovrić
orcid.org/0000-0002-2762-6439
; General County Hospital Požega, Osječka 107, Požega, Croatia
Abstract
Introduction: Health care – associated infections are constantly rising nowadays. Their prevention and supervision is of great importance. Out of all personal hygiene measures, for the transmission of patho-gens and prevention of intrahospital infections, hand hygiene has the largest role.
Research goal: To investigate the knowledge and attitudes about the importance of hand hygiene of the hospitalized individuals in the general hospital in Požega and to investigate whether there is a dif-ference between the knowledge and attitudes about the importance of the conduction of hand hygiene dependent of the sex, age, education level, marital status and the hospitals department.
Methods: The study included 102 hospitalized individuals aged 18 to 71. To determine the difference in answers the tests that are used are: Chi-squared, Mann Whitney U, Kruskall Wallis, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Dunn test. Significance level for result relevance that was chosen was p<0,05.
Results: The examinees with high school and higher education are more aware of diseases transferred by dirty hands than the ones with elementary school (Mann-Whitney U test, p=0,008). A highly larger proportion of examinees aged 51 to 70 (p=0,027) and those who are married wash their hands more often in a hospital than at home (Chi-squared test, p=0,016). Examinees hospitalized at the Internal medicine ward have asked visitors to do hand hygiene much more often than examinees at other wards (Dunn’s Post Hoc test, p=0,07). When it comes to the level of awareness, a larger number of male ex-aminees claim that the hospital staff have educated them about hand hygiene (Chi-squared test, p=0,045).
Conclusion: The results show that the patients are aware of the importance of hand hygiene, however there should be additional education within the wards and encouragement in maintaining hand hy-giene, especially with patients with a lower education level.
Keywords
hand hygiene; interhospital infection; hand washing; patient attitudes; patient knowledge
Hrčak ID:
232949
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2019.
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