Medical Students’ and Radiology Technician Trainees’ eHealth Literacy and Hygiene Awareness—Asynchronous and Synchronous Digital Hand Hygiene Training in a Single-Center Trial

Abstract

Next to the known nosocomial infections, the COVID-19 pandemic was an example for the need for the immediate implementation of functioning hygiene concepts and knowledge transfer. The aim of this study was to evaluate the self-assessment of ehealth literacy in terms of finding, using and critically evaluating health information and theoretical and practical hygiene awareness on a voluntary participation basis at the Jena University Hospital in 2022. The well-established and validated eHEALS and WHO questionnaire on hand hygiene (HH) knowledge for healthcare workers was completely filled by 204 participants (191 medical students; 13 healthcare trainees). In a second step, after the questionnaire, 77 participants completed additional asynchronous, digitally guided self-training using DesiCoach 2Go. In the end, a synchronous hand disinfection was carried out in the hospital using Visirub, by separating it into a group without (n = 191; with and without HH questionnaire) and a group with (n = 31; with HH questionnaire) previously completed self-training. For the eHL, the respondents tended to have a positive self-assessment of finding, using and critically evaluating health information. The voluntary participants of the practical hand disinfection who had received self-training were able to achieve significantly better results (p = 0.0047), resulting in fewer wetting gaps in a subsequent performance with Visirub than those who had not received digital self-training. The survey showed that healthcare-related participants belonging to the “digital native” generation have above-average knowledge on HH and profit by digitally guided self-training.