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To describe and compare attitudes toward hand hygiene and the perceived effectiveness of prevention methods among nursing students and registered nurses at a university and its affiliated university hospital.
A descriptive cross-sectional comparative survey.
A total of 201 first- and final-semester nursing students and registered nurses completed the World Health Organisation's ‘Perceptions Survey for Health-Care Workers’. The survey examined perceptions on hand hygiene, patient safety and the usefulness of improvement measures. Responses were analysed using descriptive statistics.
Nursing students consistently rated the importance of hand hygiene and related interventions higher than registered nurses. Students particularly emphasised the availability of hand disinfectants, ongoing education and supportive leadership. Both groups acknowledged the role of management support, regular feedback and organisational policies in reinforcing optimal hand hygiene.
Differences in attitudes between nursing students and registered nurses underscore the need for ongoing education, strong managerial involvement and supportive policies to sustain adherence. Strengthening these factors can help maintain positive perceptions formed during training and enhance patient safety in clinical practice.
Educational curricula and workplace strategies that prioritise hand hygiene may help lower healthcare-associated infections. Management-led feedback, continuous training and accessible hand hygiene resources offer additional support for safe patient care.
What problem did the study address? Low adherence to hand hygiene is a key driver of preventable infections. What were the main findings? Nursing students rated hand hygiene and improvement measures more highly than registered nurses, highlighting a need for strategies that sustain positive attitudes during the transition from education to clinical practice. Who will benefit? Nurse educators, clinical leaders and healthcare workers can use these findings to improve infection prevention across educational and practice settings.
We adhered to STROBE guidelines for cross-sectional research.
No patients or members of the public were involved in designing or conducting this study, which focused on perceptions of nursing students and registered nurses.
To explore what healthcare staff and staff in pharmacies experiences, as challenges, and possibilities in handling and use medications by foreign-born persons or their relatives, and how necessary information is exchanged between different units in the healthcare chain to prevent medication errors.
A qualitative explorative single-unit case study in a primary healthcare centre, with connected home care and pharmacies in an immigrant-dense area.
Individual semi-structured interviews with 17 respondents, including pharmacists, physicians and registered nurses, were conducted between May and December 2022, in Sweden. Inductive qualitative content analysis was applied.
Six categories were identified: limited knowledge about medications, lack of knowledge about the Swedish system for medication prescriptions and pharmacy regulations, insufficient time to develop trusting relations, communication to support medication management, tools for facilitating safe use of medications and problems in exchange of information in the healthcare chain.
Good communication is both a challenge and a prerequisite for safe medication management by well-informed patients. To ensure patient safety, it is crucial to establish ways to communicate with patients about their medications, regardless of their language skills. Improving communication within the healthcare chain is essential to prevent medication errors.
Understanding the complexity of medication management and preventing medication errors requires staff to communicate effectively with patients at all steps in the healthcare chain to identify their informational and educational needs.
This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the importance of communication within the healthcare chain, including prescribing physicians, nurses, pharmacists and patients, to prevent medication errors.
COREQ checklist.
This study focused on staff at a healthcare centre and two pharmacies.
FreshRSS 