Hand hygiene compliance: bridging the awareness-practice gap in sub-Saharan Africa

This review provides an exploratory overview of hand hygiene compliance in sub-Saharan Africa and examines strategies to bridge the compliance gap. While there is increasing awareness on hand hygiene, empirical evidence suggests that there is no concurrent increase in correct hand hygiene practice among key populations in sub-Saharan Africa. Children, adolescents and even healthcare providers (HCPs) in sub-Saharan Africa consistently assume poor hand hygiene compliance levels resulting in negative health consequences. Faecal-oral diseases remain common among schoolchildren, leading to school absenteeism and disease-specific morbidity. Additionally, the incidence of nosocomial infections in health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa remains high, as many HCPs do not adopt good hand hygiene practice. Increased disease burden, high healthcare costs and eroding public confidence in the healthcare system are a few implications of HCPs’ poor compliance with hand hygiene. These trends underscore the inadequacies of educational approaches (cognition model) to hand hygiene promotion commonly adopted in sub-Saharan Africa. It was therefore recommended that the governments of sub-Saharan Africa should focus on promoting skill-based hygiene education which will help schoolchildren develop good hand hygiene practice as a lifelong skill. In addition, efforts should be made to implement a multimodal hand hygiene strategy in healthcare facilities in order to increase compliance by healthcare providers.