Nursing Students Knowledge and Practice Regarding Handwashing in Riyadh Elm University: A Cross-Sectional Survey

Hand hygiene is one of the most important procedures performed in health care institutions by all the staff providing health care to patients. Less compliance to hand hygiene and lack of performing hand hygiene among students when going to the patient ward during their clinical rotation in the hospital provoked to focus on this study.

Descriptive research design was utilized under cross-sectional survey. The data was collected by both questionnaires to assess the nursing student’s knowledge and checklist to assess the students practice level. The adapted questionnaire was pre-tested before the conduct of the study. A number of 27 nursing students represent the total sample of the study. They were selected using convenience sampling technique. Once the data were collected, it was analyzed with statistical treatment using SPSS version 22.0.

Main findings have shown that nursing students were highly knowledgeable in performing handwashing during recommended situations and handwashing is a habit to their personal life. Completing the task than performing hand hygiene was the area need to focus among nursing students. There is a significant relationship between demographic characteristics and knowledge and practice level.