Review of technologies available to improve hand hygiene compliance – are they fit for purpose?

Hand hygiene has been empirically proven to prevent cross-transmission of infection, which has led to the development of global guidelines such as the World Health Organization’s ‘My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene.’ Because of the relatively recent launch of these guidelines (2009) technology designed to assist in measuring hand hygiene compliance appears not to fully acknowledge the influence of the WHO 5 Moments for hand hygiene Consequently, they may not be fit for purpose (FFP). This paper uses a review of the literature on current hand hygiene technology to assess the extent to which these are FFP based on these global guidelines. The results show that there are a variety of technologies available to assist with the monitoring and measurement of hand hygiene levels. However, none appear to explicitly achieve detection of all WHO 5 Moments for hand hygiene, limiting their effectiveness. The authors conclude that a systems approach offers a potential aid for developers aspiring to meet domain specific FFP requirements. Human factors may help guide such developments to meet user and context specific needs.