CatCare: Designing a serious game to foster hand hygiene compliance in health care facilities

Abstract

Lack of proper hand hygiene is often the source of hospital acquired infections. Despite many efforts, on average, health care workers still perform hand hygiene in less than 50% of the occasions in which they must. Serious games have been used successfully to achieve behavioral change in other health care domains. In order to tackle the complex problem of hand hygiene compliance we followed a design science research approach combining the build-phase with three evaluation cycles. In this paper, we present a preliminary design of a serious game to explore the possibilities of achieving better hand hygiene compliance of health care workers