| dc.description.abstract | • Hand hygiene compliance by hospital employees is one of the key measures that can help to improve patient safety in hospitals. At the same time, most studies assessing compliance report employees only comply half of the time!
• This master’s thesis develops, executes and analyses a quasi-experimental field study that aims to increase compliance of hospital employees with the hand hygiene protocol, by means of two behavioural interventions.
o First, nudging is an widespread approach that aims to invoke an individuals’ reflexive decision making process. However, often the same types of nudge are used. This thesis aims to develop an innovative nudge.
o Second, this thesis adds a fundamentally different and innovative approach: boosting. Boosting aims to stimulate reflection and learning of actors. By testing both interventions, their distinctive qualities can be assessed.
• The hypotheses for this study suggest both interventions are effective in increasing compliance, yet nudging is likely to have a more immediate and diminishing effect whilst boosting will show the opposite.
• The experiment is executed at a Dutch regional hospital in March-May 2019. The research question that guides the study is: What is the effect of behavioural nudging and boosting on hand hygiene protocol compliance of hospital employees?
• For operationalising and developing the interventions, a pre-experimental analysis is conducted in cooperation with healthcare professionals. Next, the experiment adopts a quasi-experimental design in which the interventions are separately tested, including a control group, two pre-tests and two post-tests.
• The results show that boosting and nudging both increase hand hygiene compliance whilst the control group showed no significant effects. Nurses subject to the nudge are 7.5 times as likely to comply in first post-test compared to the pre-test, but only 2.81 times in the second post-test. Contrarily, nurses subject to a boost are 3.74 times as likely to comply in the first post-test and 4.36 times in the second one.
• In conclusion, the experiment is successful. Notwithstanding its methodological limitations, this thesis finally discusses implications and recommends to continue innovative behavioural experiments, with an interactive development process and employing mixed methods-designs. | |
