From the College of Nursing 2004-05 Annual Report
Student Research: Melissa Quandt
Melissa Quandt
Something as simple as regularly using alcohol-based hand antiseptics in elementary school classrooms could significantly decrease the number of days children are home sick. This is the conclusion of Melissa Quandt, a master’s student in the Family Nurse Practitioner option in UW–Milwaukee’s College of Nursing, whose research was conducted during flu season on 23 third-graders in a rural Wisconsin school.
The most common illnesses among children this age are colds, conjunctivitis (pink eye), and gastroenteritis (stomach flu). Five similar studies have been conducted since 2000, all reaching the same conclusion.
But, while children in other studies used the antiseptic six or seven times daily and were educated about hand washing by a nurse, Quandt’s research had no educational component and required children to apply the hand antiseptics just three times during the school day: at the beginning of the day and after each of two recesses. “I was trying to find an easy way schools could use an antiseptic that would not cost a lot,” she says.
To measure the impact of the hand cleanser, the attendance records of the children in Quandt’s study were compared to previous years, using the same 43-day period. In previous years, for example, 43.5 percent of kindergarten children missed 0 days; 26.1 percent of first-grade children missed 0 days. During the study on the third-graders, 60.9 percent of students missed 0 days.
Regular hand washing continued during all the studies, but Quandt noted that up to 92 percent of elementary-school children do not regularly wash their hands after using the bathroom.
The antiseptic used, Avagard D, cost about $10 per month per classroom. This suggests that this could be a very cost-effective intervention to improve school attendance.
URL: http://www.uwm.edu/News/Features/06.06/CON_Handwashing.html
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