Journal article
Effectiveness of hand-hygiene interventions in reducing illness-related absence in educational settings in high income countries: systematic review and behavioural analysis
- Abstract:
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Aim: Control of infection is important to prevent school absence. We aimed to review hand-hygiene interventions in high income countries aiming to reduce gastrointestinal and upper-respiratory tract infectionrelated absence in educational settings, and identify which intervention components are effective.
Subject and methods: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Interventions were coded according to Behaviour Change Techniques Taxonomy. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Education Resource Information Centre, Science and Social Sciences Citation Index and the British Education Index from 1 September 2014 to 25 May 2022, papers included in a 2014 review by Willmott et al., and hand-searching reference lists of included studies. We also searched for, and coded, relevant international guidelines on handhygiene.
Results: We screened 1653 papers, including 11 papers from 9 studies. Meta-analysis showed that school-based interventions significantly reduced respiratory tract and gastrointestinal infection-related absence (relative rate ratio 0.754; 95% confidence interval 0.602 to 0.944). Evidence from subgroup analysis supports the use of more than seven behaviour change techniques, targeting both adults and children, and providing information on the risks of inadequate hand-hygiene as well as instruction. The effectiveness of individual behaviour change techniques could not be determined. We found no evidence to support the interventions currently recommended in a range of international guidelines.
Conclusion: School-based hand-hygiene interventions are effective in reducing infection-related absence. There is some evidence that the number and type of behaviour change techniques used in interventions is important in increasing intervention success.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 886.0KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s10389-023-02044-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Journal:
- Journal of Public Health More from this journal
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 659–670
- Publication date:
- 2023-08-10
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-07-19
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1741-3850
- ISSN:
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1741-3842
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1493801
- Local pid:
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pubs:1493801
- Deposit date:
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2023-07-19
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Hoyle et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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