Methods

We have known about the importance of hand hygiene for preventing the spread of infection since the work of Semmelweis (Cork, Maxwell, & Pinckney, 2011). The World Health Organization (WHO, 2009) has cited consistent and proper hand hygiene practices as the single most effective way to prevent hospital acquired infections (HAI). Studies show that hand hygiene compliance rates rarely exceed 50 % (Sahud, Bhanot, Narasimhan & Malka, 2012). It is estimated that over 1.7M patients are harmed and as many as 90,155 die annually from a HAI (Scott, 2009; Blouin 2010). The WHO observer based method (WHO, 2009) for measuring hand hygiene compliance is currently considered the gold standard. Limitations of this method include: expense, observer bias and obstructed views, and measures only a small sample of actual occurrences. The development of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for measuring hand hygiene compliance moments holds promise to improve upon the observer method. With this in mind, a vendor supplied RFID system was selected and tested to evaluate how accurately it measure room entry and exit hand hygiene compliance