Hand Hygiene Systematic Reviews
As part of its mandate to address the demand for guidance on clinical or public health areas where there is uncertainty, and in response to demand from governments and non-governmental actors, the WHO is developing Guidelines on hand hygiene in community settings. The Guidelines will provide evidence-based recommendations to governments on how to improve hand hygiene in community settings.
The goal of this review is to systematically retrieve and synthesize available evidence on hand hygiene in community settings across four key areas (effective hand hygiene, minimum requirements, behavior change and government measures). The questions addressed by this review are the result of an extensive consultation carried out during 2022. In brief, experts and leading organizations were consulted to assess questions drafted on the basis of the areas of uncertainty, controversy or gaps in global guidance as identified in an initial scoping review of current guidelines. Priority questions were then generated to align with the four key areas, and the WHO and external experts further identified sub-questions necessary to address. The overall goal of this integrated review is to address the priority questions. below:
Effective hand hygiene: Which hand hygiene methods are effective at removing or deactivating pathogens associated with disease transmission by hands in community settings? (RQ1)
Minimum requirements: What are the minimum requirements (material needs) for the sustained practice of effective hand hygiene in community settings? (RQ2)
Behaviour change: What are key behavioural barriers and enablers to practicing effective hand hygiene in community settings? (RQ3.1). Among interventions to improve hand hygiene in community settings, what theories, barriers and enablers, intervention functions and behaviour change techniques, and design features have been leveraged effectively to improve and sustain hand hygiene in community settings? (RQ3.2)
Government measures: What government measures have been implemented to support minimum requirements—water and soap—for equitable and sustained practice of effective hand hygiene in community settings? (RQ4)
Prospero registration: CRD42023429145
Publications:
TIMELINE
2023-2024
Principal Investigators
Emory University: Bethany Caruso, Marlene Wolfe, Matthew Freeman
Funders
World Health Organization
Project Staff
Jedidiah Snyder, Lilly O’Brien
informationist
Hannah Rogers
Reviewers
Sridevi Prasad, Erin LaFon, Kennedy Files, Nick An, Stephen Patrick Hilton, Rosemary Madaki, Jordan Honeycutt, Erika Canda, Dewan Muhammad Shoaib, Shahreen Hussain, Josef Zhao, Rina Das, Nahom Bekele, Liya Getachew, Filmon Gebremichael, Kainalu Bailey, Lanelle Nwogalanya, Michael Horner-Ibler, Norah McKinley