Hand Hygiene Compliance Monitoring

Data Collection Type
National data collections of health and social care in Ireland
Organisation

Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC).

Year established

2011

Statement of purpose

In scope: To support overall multi-faceted strategy for the control and prevention of infectious diseases by providing standardised measure of observational hand hygiene compliance for acute hospitals.

Coverage (geographical and temporal)

42 public and nine private acute hospitals contributed to the data in Oct 2021. This represents an even geographical spread across Ireland.

Data collected twice per year in May/June and Oct/Nov.

Description/Summary

Compliance with World Health Organization (WHO) “Five Moments of Hand Hygiene” opportunities by healthcare workers in acute hospitals. Data from hand hygiene audit tools (MS Excel) are collated by HPSC via the MicroB online tool and the results published.

Data users

Infection control teams in acute hospitals.

Data content

MS Excel tools of wards audited, WHO moment, hand hygiene action taken, staff category, with date/time and (additional optional fields are also taken).

Data dictionary

Not available.

National-level identifier variables

Not applicable.

Equity stratifiers

Not applicable.

Data collection methodology

Trained infection and control staff conduct hospital-wide audits of hand hygiene compliance by the facility’s own healthcare workers. Twice yearly (June & Oct) national audits are conducted, of 7 wards per facility with 30 hand hygiene opportunities per each ward audited. Automated data upload, analysis, report generation and approval for publication facilitated via HPSC’s online tool, MicroB.

Clinical coding scheme

N/A.

Size of national collection

N/A.

Publication frequency

Bi-annual and annual reports are available on HPSC website at www.hpsc.ie.

Accessing data

Data requests can be submitted via hpsc@hse.ie and will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Open data portal access

No.

Email contact
Telephone contact