Background: Hand hygiene is a very simple and life saving procedure. The average compliance among Healthcare workers (HCWs) still remains low. Poor infrastructure in Sudanese hospitals, inadequate training of staff, lack of well established infection prevention teams all contribute to high rates of hospital acquired infections (HAIs).
Aim: This study was carried out to determine and to compare the knowledge, attitudes and practices of hand hygiene among HCWs in order to understand why compliance among HCWs is low.
Methods: Data was collected using questionnaires from 237 HCWs working in the hospital and analyzed using the Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23. A p value of < 0.05 was considered significant.
Results: Only 39.2% of HCWs in the hospital had received training sessions on hand hygiene in the past six months. Sufficient knowledge about hand hygiene was demonstrated in only 35.6% of the HCWs, 20.2% of them had positive attitudes and 18.1% adopted good hand hygiene practices. Nurses had significantly better knowledge and better practices of hand hygiene than doctors. There was however, no significant difference between the attitudes of the two categories of HCWs.
Discussion: Insufficient knowledge, negative attitudes and poor practices of HCWs coupled with lack of training may be why HAIs in the hospital are high.
Conclusion: Urgent training of the staff is recommended and should target doctors who may continue to spread infections in the hospital
Key words: hand hygiene, healthcare workers and hospital acquired infections
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