Becoming Hand Hygiene Heroes: Implementation of an Infection Prevention and Control Campaign for Patient and Family Hospital Safety

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that hand hygiene (HH) is key in preventing health care-associated infections. Patients and families are understudied targets for infection prevention and control practices. Previous campaigns to change HH behavior have been effective, but often face systemic challenges with implementation.

Methods: The "Hand Hygiene Heroes" educational campaign was developed to improve patient and family HH at 2 tertiary care pediatric and obstetrics hospitals. Its multiple phases included visual materials, tailored activities for 9 hospital units, and long-term evaluation during a 2-year period. HH rates among patients/families and health care workers were measured at baseline and throughout the campaign via direct observation.

Results: Overall, HH significantly increased for both patients/families (OR 1.82, P .041) and health care workers (OR 2.15, P < .001) after campaign initiation. However, individual units had varying degrees of sustainment on follow-up evaluations.

Discussion: Duration of intervention, activity simplicity, active participation, and resource availability may affect success of campaign initiatives. Positive prognostic factors included mixed leadership support from administration and frontline workers, predetermined sustainability plans, and tailored activities by target audience.

Conclusions: Implementation of hospital educational campaigns can be resource-intensive but can positively impact patient and family HH.