While many factors contribute to school absenteeism, student illness is believed to be the main driver of student absenteeism. The transmission of pathogenic organisms within schools can result in infections making students too sick to attend classes. Diseases such as influenza, rhinovirus, and norovirus, are common diseases that can be positively impacted by more frequent hand hygiene and routine cleaning and disinfection of commonly touched surfaces, according to research featured in a new white paper from Diversey.
There is a common, incorrect, belief that even if surfaces in a classroom become contaminated with organisms, the organisms die quickly and thus do not contribute to making students sick. A number of factors are known to influence how long organisms survive on environmental surfaces including the nature of the organism, surface material and temperature, soil level, humidity, and air temperature. A literature review looked at studies that investigated the relationship between various organisms and the length of time they can survive on various surfaces and found that many species of bacteria can survive for months on surfaces while some can only survive for a few days. Also, a number of published studies show that absenteeism can be reduced by 5-10% by placing more emphasis on hand hygiene in a school with education programs on hand hygiene and encouraging the use of alcohol-based hand rub (ABHR).
One recent study, in Spain at five state schools, had students either wash their hands using soap and water, or wash their hands followed by using ABHR. This study showed a 32% reduction in days missed per academic year suggesting that hand washing followed by ABHR is more protective than hand washing or ABHR alone and may offer the largest opportunity to reduce absenteeism. But despite efforts to teach students to perform hand hygiene, it is often done infrequently.
Handwashing by students after bathroom use has been reported at 58% for girls and 48% for boys. The numbers are worse if soap use is investigated, with those actually using soap reported at 28% for girls and 8% for boys, suggesting many student’s idea of handwashing is to run water over their hands. Low soap use was due to a combination of factors including frequently empty soap dispenser, suggesting a lack of willingness or knowledge of how to perform hand hygiene are not the only reasons students do not perform hand hygiene.
Two major literature reviews have been done of studies investigating the relationship between hand hygiene and student absenteeism and the two reviews came to somewhat different conclusions. Both conducted literature reviews of studies on hand hygiene in education settings and found that the literature shows that frequent hand hygiene can have an impact on infection rates and student absenteeism.
