Evaluation of the number of opportunities for hand hygiene in hospital: A new methodological approach Ce ´ line Slekovec a , Ve ´ ronique Denizot a , Lucie Vettoretti b , Anne Ponchon b , Fre ´de ´ ric Mauny b , Didier Hocquet a , Xavier Bertrand a, *, Daniel Talon a a Service d’Hygie `ne Hospitalie `re, UMR6249 Chrono-environnement, CHRU Besanc ¸on, France b Centre d’Investigation Clinique, CHRU Besanc ¸on, France What is already known about the topic? - Alcohol-based hand rubbing has become the reference method in hospitals for hand hygiene. - The consumption of alcohol-based solutions reflects how efficient hospitals are in tackling the hygiene issue. - The French Ministry of Health has defined an index of alcohol-based solutions consumption based on theore- tical minimal number of daily hand-rubbing opportu- nities (48 per bed in intensive care units, 7 per bed in medical units and 9 per bed in surgical units) considering a volume of 3 mL for each opportunity - The index French is expressed as the ratio of real annual consumption/theoretical annual consumption and hos- pitals are benchmarked according this index. What this paper adds - The measuring tool (Nursing Research Project) available in our hospital for the overall nursing workload was combined with the number of hand hygiene opportu- nities defined by the WHO to assess the number of ABHR opportunities. - Our study concerns over a million procedures, for more than 120,000 hospitalization days and for more than 21,000 patients. International Journal of Nursing Studies 50 (2013) 413–418 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 6 April 2012 Received in revised form 7 September 2012 Accepted 13 September 2012 Keywords: Hand-rub disinfection Hand hygiene Infection control Healthcare associated infections A B S T R A C T Objective: To assess the number of alcohol-based hand rubbing (ABHR) opportunities in different wards of a university hospital. Materials and methods: The amount of care procedures was measured in nine wards (4 medical wards, 4 surgical wards, 1 intensive care unit) over a two-year period. We converted the number of care procedures into a number of ABHR opportunities using the definition provided by the World Health Organization that takes in account the nature of the care procedure and the number of healthcare workers involved in. We compared these data with those obtained by other authors and the theoretical minimal number of ABHR opportunities defined by the French Ministry of Health. Results: 1,252,671 care procedures (with a mean period of 734 days/department, 122,866 days of hospitalization and 21,905 patients) were converted into ABHR opportunities. The mean number of care procedures and ABHR per day and per patient was 6.1 and 35 for the medical departments, 7.6 and 49 for the surgery departments, 14.8 and 237 for the intensive care unit, respectively. Conclusion: Our methodological approach strengthens the results of previous observa- tional studies. Here, we showed that the number of ABHR opportunities is far higher than that defined by the French Ministry of Health to measure the hand hygiene hospital endeavour. ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author at: Service d’Hygie `ne Hospitalie ` re, CHRU Besanc ¸on, 3 Bd Fleming, Besanc ¸on 25030, France. Tel.: +33 381 669 053. E-mail address: xbertrand@chu-besancon.fr (X. Bertrand). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect International Journal of Nursing Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/ijns 0020-7489/$ – see front matter ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2012.09.015