Improving patients' hand hygiene in the acute care setting: Is staff education enough?

Patients' hand hygiene (PHH) has been associated with reduction of healthcare-associated infections. We compared staff education about the importance of PHH versus providing patients with alcohol wipes for PHH. Our study found that staff education increased the percentage of patients reporting that they had been educated/encouraged to perform PHH but this intervention alone did not resulted in a statistically significant increase of the average frequency of PHH per day.