Hand Hygiene Barriers faced byHealth Care Workers in The Gambia: : A Health Belief Model Approach

Sammanfattning: Health care associated infections cause major challenges to the provision of health care. This isdue to the burden placed on individuals, their families, and health services. Hand hygiene actions are cost effective measures towards reducing the spread of health care associated infections and have proven very effective in preventing microbial transmission during patient care. It has beenproven that health care workers hands are the main routes of transmission of health care associated infections. Despite this, hand hygiene is still frequently overlooked by health careworkers especially in settings with limited resources. This paper therefore explores hand hygieneknowledge and behaviours of public and private health care workers in The Gambia with focuson the health belief model. The required information has been gathered from 4 public and 2 private health care facilities through the use of a questionnaire based on the WHO evaluation toolkit. Hand hygiene knowledge of health care workers corresponded with their hand hygiene behaviour. Inadequate hand hygiene performance was noted in many health care workers as wellas limited availability of hand hygiene resources from health care facilities. Private health care facilities provided better hand hygiene opportunities for their health care workers yet neither private nor public health care facilities offered adequate hand hygiene training and feedback on hand hygiene performances to their health care workers.