Educational sessions may not be enough to improve knowledge about hand hygiene: Assessing the knowledge about hand hygiene of health workers before and after an educational workshop in Sudan

Background : In an attempt to defeat the high prevalence of health care associated infections, by raising the awareness about hand hygiene, we implemented a quasi-experimental study as part of a quality improvement project to evaluate the efficacy of focused educational workshop on knowledge about hand hygiene among health care workers in Sudan. Methods: Seventy-three participants were recruited from two public hospitals and one private hospital in Khartoum, Sudan in September 2017. The knowledge before and after the educational workshop was assessed for each participant using the World Health Organization hygiene associated infection questionnaire. We analyzed data using SPSS v22 and used McNemar’s test to compare knowledge before and after the workshop. Results: Around 40% of participants worked in general ward and 85% of them were women. Almost 70% were midwives or nurses. The mean age of participants was 28.4 years. We compared the knowledge of hand hygiene between nurses and doctors before the workshop, and the results showed that nurses had better knowledge in almost all aspects of hand hygiene. When we compared the knowledge before and immediately after the workshop for all participants, we found that there was no significant improvement in almost all aspects of knowledge about hand hygiene (P>0.05). Conclusion: Comparing the knowledge before and after the workshop, we found no significant improvement in almost all aspects of hand hygiene. Of note, nurses’ knowledge about hand hygiene was consistently higher than doctors.  Additional studies are needed to identify the optimal design of educational sessions.