New technologies to monitor healthcare worker hand hygiene

Compliance with hand hygiene is a good quality indicator for hospital patient safety programmes. Hand hygiene is a major infection control prevention intervention, but in many medical centres compliance rates are only c. 50%. Given the enormous number of hand hygiene opportunities in hospitals, direct observation to monitor compliance is very inefficient. However, technologies are emerging to obviate the need for direct observation. These new technologies for monitoring hand hygiene compliance are discussed in this article.