Healthcare workers’ hand-hygiene compliance is better when other workers are present, according to a study in the October issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.
“Social network effects, or peer effects, have been associated with smoking, obesity, happiness and worker productivity. As we found, this influence extends to hand hygiene compliance, too,” Philip Polgreen, MD, an author of the study, said in an article on the FacilityCare website.
The estimated hand-hygiene rate was 7 percent higher when healthcare workers were close to peers when compared to when healthcare workers were alone.
The study shows the importance of the social environment in healthcare and has important implications for understanding how human behavior affects the spread of diseases, according to the study.
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