Nursing Research on Hand Hygiene Compliance and Nosocomial Infections

Running head: NURSING RESEARCH 1
Nursing Research on Hand Hygiene Compliance and Nosocomial Infections
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

NURSING RESEARCH 2
Nursing Research on Hand Hygiene Compliance and Nosocomial Infections
Nurses are undeniably the major contributors to the health workforce and comprise
the largest proportion of the total health care professionals in the health care sector. It is
essential that great care is taken in revising the guidelines for nursing practice, which will
essentially help the nursing workforce to deliver the highest standards of care to the
community. One of the most potential and effective way to ensure this is to make use of
evidence-based practices, which essentially helps the nurse to adapt to the latest standards of
practices backed up by clinical evidences (Schmidt, 2018).
The following sections of the paper will examine a nursing-practice related problem
and will elaborately examine available evidence in the form of qualitative and quantitative to
address the nursing issue.
Nursing Practice Problem and PICOT Statement
Even though nursing practices are highly critical of ensuring patient safety and
positive health outcome in them, several issues arise due to the incidence of non-compliance
with the practices found in the nursing workforce. One such major issue is the incidence of
healthcare-associated infections, also known as nosocomial infections. Nosocomial infections
are defined by the occurrence of infections in patients or health workforce, developed in the
hospital while receiving health care from the facility. These infections develop within 48
hours post-hospitalization or after 30 days of post receiving care. It is evident that nurses are
the first point of contact for the majority of the patients and thus, are the primary
intermediates via which, such infectious germs get transferred. The health care providers,
including the nursing professionals, are responsible for preventing the incidence of
nosocomial or other healthcare-associated infections within their clinical settings. According
to the United States of America’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention report, over 1.7
million patients that are hospitalized, acquire such infections annually and one out of every

NURSING RESEARCH 3
seventeen patient, that is, over 98,000 patients, die due to the infection. This indicates how
grave the health issue of nosocomial infection is, and demands the integration of evidence
based practices by the health care professionals in their clinical setting. The Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality reports that nosocomial infections are amongst the top ten
leading cause of deaths and one of the top tier complications of clinical care.
To reduce the incidence and prevalence of nosocomial infections in clinical settings,
hand hygiene compliance is deemed to be one of the most effective strategies. The World
Health Organization has provided essential guidelines to meet the standards of hand hygiene
by health care professionals, especially nurses.
To analyse the correlation between nosocomial infections and hand hygiene, the
intervention of increased adherence to hand hygiene guideline will be applied to the
population of health care unit staffs, with the aim of achieving the outcome of reduced
incidence of hospital-acquired infection. The stated time for implementing the intervention
and analyse the results of the final outcome is six months. To get greater insight on the
efficiency of the intervention, a comparison will be made with the non-compliance to the
hand hygiene guidelines in the health care unit staffs to draw results on its influence on the
prevalence of hospital-acquired infections.
PICOT Question: For health care professionals working in a clinical setting does
implement training and education initiatives for increasing adherence to standard hand
hygiene guidelines (I), compared to the current suboptimal practices (C), decreases the
incidence of HCAIs (O), when evaluated over a period of 6 months?
Background of Studies
The first quantitative study examined is conducted Murni, Duke, Kinney, Daley and
Soenarto (2015), where the researchers tried incorporation of multidimensional infection
prevention strategy and antibiotic stewardship program to adjudge the efficacy of the