Assignment on Evidence Based Practice Project

Running head: EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE PROJECT
EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE PROJECT
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author’s name

EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE PROJECT
Part 1:
Introduction
Despite the compliance of the healthcare professionals with modern techniques, scientific
equipment and other advancements, the rising prevalence of healthcare associated infection
among the patients during the course of their stay at the hospital is inevitable. The higher
incidence of healthcare associated infection (HAI) is thus, drawing attention of the healthcare
sector, insurers, government and other regulatory bodies (Mathur, 2011). Hospital acquired
infections that are greatly associated with increased morbidity, a significant rise in the treatment
cost, decreased patient’s health outcome, longer hospital stay and an increased mortality rate,
have proven to be of an important area of focus while developing polices for infection control.
Thus, control and management of these infections through proper and effective strategies are the
areas of focus, provided the aim is to increase patient’s health outcome and decrease mortality.
Evidences have proven that hand hygiene is a major component of the infection control and thus,
healthcare workers must be continuously given trainings and seminars to develop their
compliance with hand hygiene (Shobowale, Adegunle & Onyedibe, 2016). Hand hygiene is
found to be effective in reducing various infections including those which are multidrug
resistant. The spread of HAIs is evident in every clinical settings, however, the area of focus in
this paper is acute care settings like ICU where the presence of MRSA is common among the
health professionals working in ICU (Mathur, 2011). Study finding from researches conducted in
this area have supported the importance of hand hygiene in reducing HAIs among patients, thus,

EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE PROJECT
this paper aim at finding the relevant evidences and recommend the need for change to reduce
HAIs by focusing in the effectiveness of hand hygiene.
Australian guidelines for preventing and controlling the occurrence of HAIs involve a
policy, NSW Health Infection Prevention and Control Policy that outlines the best practices to
reduce the risk of patients, staffs, visitors, health workers and volunteers obtaining a healthcare
associated infection, any communicable disease or multiresistant organism. According to the
policy, a higher rate of microorganisms is present on hands, thus, hand washing forms an
important part of maintaining hand hygiene either by applying water in case of removing visible
soil or dirt, or waterless antimicrobial agent (E.g., Alcohol based hand rub) to the surface of dry
and unsoiled hands or liquid soap and running water followed by dry patting with single use
towel (Health.nsw.gov.au, 2020).

EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE PROJECT
Research question following PICO format:
How hand washing increases hand hygiene compliance among the healthcare workers in
acute care settings and reduces the risk of hospital associated infections (HAIs)?
PICO elements:
Elements Examples
P (Problem or Patient or Population) Hospital Associated Infections (HAIs)
I (intervention/indicator) Hand washing
C (comparison) No hand washing, or other solutions, alcohol
based hand rub
O (outcome of interest) Reduced rate of infection
Search strategy
In order to conduct this evidence research, secondary data were collected from research
journals and articles in several online databases such as CINAHL, Pub Med and Google scholar
related to the topic area. A total of 11 articles were found to be matching with the topic being
researched. However, only 5 articles were chosen for the study since they are met the inclusion
criteria. Articles extracted from the repositories were analysed by skimming through the abstract
that gave a succinate flow and precise information about the research study. Those paper lacking