Glow gel hand washing in the waiting room: a novel approach to improving hand hygiene education.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were children, teenagers and adults, both men and women.

Emergency department waiting room at a freestanding urban pediatric hospital.

Children (8-18 years) and their parent.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized and pilot study.

Because people in this study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger study would be practical.

Participants were randomized to glow gel hand washing without hand hygiene education or glow gel hand washing with hand hygiene education.

After participants washed with glow gel, "dirty areas" were illuminated using a black light, and hands were scored.

A questionnaire about handwashing behavior was administered.

All subjects returned 2-4 weeks after intervention to repeat glow gel hand washing and the questionnaire.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Adolescent Behavior, Child Behavior, Emergency Service, Hospital, Fluorescence, Gels, Hand Disinfection and Health Education.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and pilot study.

Its findings take up roughly 8 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2011 (Infection control and hospital epidemiology), a journal based in United States.

More context: all human trials.