Abstract

Evaluating the WHO �Five Moments for Hand Hygiene� as a new way of teaching hand hygiene to junior medical students

Author(s): Mr George Hogg

The teaching of effective compliance with hand hygiene has been foremost in the early education of junior medical students within the Clinical Skills Centre at the University of Dundee (UK) for the last five years. Early introduction of students to the hospital ward setting in Semester 1 of their course means that the prevention of infection is at the forefront in the minds of the teaching staff. Until September 2007 the focus of teaching was hand washing using soap and water with some reference to alcohol hand rub. The introduction of the World Health Organisation (WHO) ‘Five Moments for Hand Hygiene Model’ into the National Health Service (NHS) was an ideal opportunity to implement and evaluate this model as a new method of teaching medical students. This paper describes an Action Research based project undertaken by the author with 165 Year 1, Semester 1 medical students. The results from Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) and focus groups demonstrate that the ‘WHO Five Moments’ is an effective base from which to improve hand hygiene compliance in a clinical skills setting.