Abstract

Background: Hand washing is an important element for the children because the children are most vulnerable to suffer from contaminated hands. Children are at risk of many infectious disease due to poor hygiene practices. Hand hygiene play important role to reduce the spread of infectious diseases and to combat illnesses.

Aim: To see the effect of children hand washing practices on risk of infectious diseases in a community settings. Methodology: An interventional study was conducted in the seven rural communities of Lahore, Pakistan in school settings. The sample size was 1076 school students in grade 4th and 5th divided into intervention and control group. A well-structured adopted questioner was used for collecting the data from the participant. Interventions were applied for 12 weeks. Ethical consideration was followed. Data was analyzed on SPSS (version 21.0) Descriptive statistics was applied to determine the demographics of students. Inferential statistics was applied to see the impact of educational interventions. Results: Morbidity data results in two group depict profound differences. Result of Chi-square test are also evident that hand washing practices proved helpful to reduce disease burden in school children. p-value of <0.05 depict significant results. Conclusion: Hand washing practices had statistically significant effect on risk of infection. Study results confirmed that hand- hygiene interventions are efficacious for preventing illnesses and reducing infection risk in children. This study mitigate the need to enhance children hand washing behavior to overcome the infectious ailments.

Keywords: Hand Washing, Educational Intervention, Infection Risk, Children.