Hand Hygiene as an Evidence-Based Practice Essay

Critical Discussion of an Identified Everyday Practice

Evidence-based practice is associated with the prevention of repeated practice, productive decision making, and improved clinical efficiency. Being an evidence-based issue, hand hygiene occupies an important place in the investigations of practices and their efficiency (Nguyen et al., 2022). While the necessity of evidence-based practice is undoubted, its practical application may meet various obstacles. One of such restrictions is presented with the hierarchy of evidence. Such hierarchy has popularized randomized control trials (RCTs) as the most accurate evidence origin. Still, nurse practitioners frequently find it complicated to apply as RCTs tend to disregard some types of knowledge which eventually proves to supply beneficial data for nursing practice (Zia et al., 2022). Since evidence-based practice and reflection have common targets and methods, it may be necessary to disregard the hierarchy of evidence and allow reflection to evolve into the basic elements of the evidence-based practice activity. Evidence, as a result, brings about subjective connotations related to reflective approaches.

Disregard of hand hygiene may lead to failure of patient safety; thus, this evidence-based practice requires special attention of the medical workers. Patient safety is the most crucial purpose of healthcare activity, and therefore, its importance cannot be overestimated. Some scholars remark that the problem of evidence is that it is not always applied in practice (Ahmed et al., 2020). The necessity of evidence implementation is proved by numerous cases of inadequate practices. What is worse, such unproductive activity may lead to serious damage to patients’ health (Keleb et al., 2021). Thus, scholars suggest that successful alterations should be realized to eliminate the adverse outcomes of ineffective practices.

The research of required evidence is an essential part of nursing knowledge. Nurses need to combine various types of knowledge and practices to accumulate their knowledge base. Providing evidence-based care is the basic aim of professional nursing care (Alwatifi and Hattab, 2022). Nurse staff should realize the importance of enriching their knowledge with research pertinent to their practice (Krämer et al., 2022). As it is further illustrated, research evidence about the practice of hand hygiene is successfully implemented in medical workers’ activity.

Explication of and Justification for the Origin of the Practice Associated with the Issue

Hand hygiene is one of the most crucial issues in nursing as disregarding it may lead to spreading disease among patients and staff. Thus, hand hygiene remains the basic preventive action against microbe transmission. Scholars have investigated the medical workers’ compliance with the practice requirements (Ayyappan, Varghese and Ismail, 2021), compare the level of diseases connected with health care in pre- and post-implementation of hygiene guidelines (Greene and Wilson, 2022), analyze how hand hygiene can prevent spreading of microbes (Rasmussen et al., 2021), and explore the causes of insufficient hand hygiene among medical workers (Sierra, Perez-Jaimes and Díaz, 2022). Thus, numerous researches on hand hygiene have supported this practice to be an appropriately evidence-based issue.

Healthcare workers’ hands are known to be a source of spreading the disease from patient to patient or other workers. While performing their usual work, medical staff can get contaminated with dangerous organisms. If they neglect hand hygiene, these organisms may survive and spread in the hospital environment (Kumar et al., 2021). Such evidence shows that proper hand hygiene conduct is a key element of blockage of infection connected with healthcare. Moreover, explicit site infections can be prevented by applying correct hygiene methods (Ayyappan, Varghese and Ismail, 2021). In this context, one of the successful prevention procedures is environmental cleaning, and another suggestion is to replace the use of water and soap with an alcohol-based waterless antiseptic.

Due to the research, hand hygiene conduct may be typified into two kinds of practice: inherent and elective. The first one takes place when hands are dirty or greasy. The second kind encompasses the cases excluded from the inherent practice (Ahmed et al., 2020). In their investigation of poor hand hygiene, Rasmussen et al. (2021) conclude that the cases of negligence happen due to the lack of constructive examples and untrustworthy evidence of the ability hand hygiene to prevent infection. Thus, factors regulating the lack of hand hygiene compliance are numerous.

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