Background. Hand hygiene is recognized as the leading measure to prevent cross-transmission of microorganisms. Regarding hospital acquired infections, the compliance of nurses with hand washing guidelines seems to be vital in preventing the disease transmission among patients. There is a paucity of studies exploring this subject in Asia. Especially medical and nursing student’s knowledge of standard hand hygiene precautions is rarely compared. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 98 medical and 46 nursing students in a tertiary medical college in India. Knowledge was assessed using WHO hand hygiene questionnaire. Attitude and practices were evaluated by using another self-structured questionnaire. test was used to compare the percentage of correct responses between medical and nursing students. A value less than 0.05 was considered significant. Results. Only 9% of participants (13 out of 144) had good knowledge regarding hand hygiene. Nursing students knowledge ( ) , attitude ( ), and practices ( ) were significantly better than medical students. 1. Introduction Hand hygiene is recognized as the leading measure to prevent cross-transmission of microorganisms and to reduce the incidence of health care associated infections [1, 2]. Despite the relative simplicity of this procedure, compliance with hand hygiene among health care providers is as low as 40% [3–5]. To address this problem, continuous efforts are being made to identify effective and sustainable strategies. One of such efforts is the introduction of an evidence-based concept of “My five moments for hand hygiene” by World Health Organization. These five moments that call for the use of hand hygiene include the moment before touching a patient, before performing aseptic and clean procedures, after being at risk of exposure to body fluids, after touching a patient, and after touching patient surroundings. This concept has been aptly used to improve understanding, training, monitoring, and reporting hand hygiene among healthcare workers [6]. Nurses constitute the largest percentage of the health care workers (HCW) [7] and they are the “nucleus of the health care system” [8]. Because they spend more time with patients than any other HCWs, their compliance with hand washing guidelines seems to be more vital in preventing the disease transmission among patients. In Asia there is a paucity of studies [7–10] exploring this subject, although the prevalence of health care associated infections is high in this region; especially medical and nursing student’s knowledge of standard
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