Wednesday, August 15, 2012

What happens when an anthropologist studies hand hygiene?

Heather Reisinger is a medical anthropologist at the University of Iowa and the Iowa City VA.  Her research and service efforts have involved hand-hygiene improvement efforts in VA, including leading a system-wide hand-hygiene practice survey and interacting with operations partners to improve hand hygiene.  She recently discussed her efforts to balance research with process improvement in the latest issue of Anthropology News.  Her questions focus on discrepancies between reported hand-hygiene compliance rates (e.g. 90%) and the lower rates observed during research funded compliance monitoring (e.g. 40%) and other important but unanswered questions.  Worth a read.

Reference: Reisinger H et al. "Improving Hand Hygiene: The Intriguing Space Between Health Services Research and Clinical Operations" Anthropology News, August 2012

Image source: Ethnography Museum, Budapest
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