Healthcare worker hand hygiene rates increase three-fold when auditors visible

Hand hygiene rates were found to be three times higher when auditors were visible to healthcare workers than when there were no auditors present, according to a study in a major Canadian acute care hospital. The study examined the Hawthorne effect, also known as observation bias -- the tendency of people to change their behavior when they are aware of an observer -- using an electronic monitoring hand hygiene system in real-time, eliminating many of the biases inherent to human observation.