Effectiveness of hand hygiene teaching on knowledge and compliance of hand washing among the students at a selected school in Mugalivakkam village, Kancheepuram District

Background: One of the major health problems in our country is unsanitary conditions especially poor hand hygiene leads to a rigorous public health hazard to children in the school. Children are not aware of important of hand hygiene at school level. Health education is considered necessary for better knowledge. Materials and Methods: Quantitative quasi experimental randomized one group pretest and posttest design study was carried out to find out the effectiveness of hand hygiene teaching on knowledge, compliance and to correlate the level of hand hygiene knowledge with compliance of hand washing among the students. The knowledge was assessed by questionnaire and compliance was assessed by sterile hand swab collection to do bacteriological culture test in the microbiology laboratory. Among six primary schools in the Mugallivakkam village at Kancheepuram District one primary school was selected using simple lottery method. Five students from 2 nd , 3rd, 4th and 5 th standard were selected using simple random sampling. The total sample size was 20. The period of data collection was from 16-6-2012 to 13-7-2012. The 20 primary school students were split into four subgroups of each consisting of five school children. Then teaching programme on hand hygiene was given using laptop. Posttest was conducted on knowledge and compliance after three weeks. Results: The mean value of knowledge between the pretest and posttest showed a vast statistically significant difference at p