Brief report
Beliefs about hand hygiene: A survey in medical students in their first clinical year

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Medical students were asked regarding knowledge and beliefs on hand hygiene before entering the clinical phase of education. By this, we noticed a lack of knowledge concerning the correct indications for hand disinfection. Regardless of previous experience in hospitals, the medical students expected that the compliance towards hand hygiene would be worse in more experienced physicians and senior consultants—who are often considered to be role models for medical students.

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Methods

Medical students at Hannover Medical School, located in a German tertiary care university hospital, were asked about their beliefs on HH comprising the following: (1) the indications for HH, (2) HH compliance in different medical departments, (3) possible reasons for noncompliance, (4) average HH compliance that is usually achieved in hospital, and (5) potential for reduction of nosocomial infections by 100% HH compliance. For this purpose, a survey sheet was handed out at the very beginning of

Results

All 85 medical students (36 male and 49 female) completed the questionnaire. Most claimed to have had at least some clinical experience at this time: 69 students (81%) reported minor clinical experience only, 13 students (15%) had already graduated in another medical profession such as nursery or paramedic assistance, 3 students did not provide information about previous experience.

The complete results of our survey are shown in Table 1. When judging possible indications for HH, almost 100%

Discussion

In a British survey from 2006, 58% of the medical students did not know the correct indications for using alcohol-based hand rub.3 In our survey, we also detected a lack of knowledge about the indications for HH among medical students when entering the clinical phase of training: 33% missed at least 1 true indication for HH, and only 21% of the students marked all options correctly. Even the ones from the subgroup who had already graduated in some kind of medicine-related profession did not

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Conflicts of interest: None to report.

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