Lead: Kelly Ann Schmidtke (Methodology)

Dates: March 2019 - Published Jan 2020

Background:

This research was conducted prior to the ARC WM commencing. ARC WM is not contributing to the follow on impact of the research. The research commenced with help from the Global Hygiene Council. Emotive (a company) approached Schmidtke on behalf of Reckitt Benckiser to provide background research into the barriers and facilitates of hand hygiene and environmental disinfecting in settings likely to include children. As part of this research an open source literature publication was produced in 2020 (Staniford & Schmidtke. BMC Public Health. 2020; 20: 195).

Policy and Practice Partners:

Reckitt Benckiser: A British multinational consumer goods company headquartered in Slough, England. It is a producer of health, hygiene and home products. The company was formed in March 1999 by the merger of British company Reckitt & Colman plc and Dutch company Benckiser N.V. Reckitt Benckiser engages in consumer markets, defined by country. They have a keen interest on influencing public policy in lower- and middle-income countries, where the hygiene infrastructure stands to improve and where direct to consumer marketing is less likely to be effective.

Aims and Objectives:

The literature review had two aims. First, we aimed to learn what behaviour change techniques had already been assessed to increase hand-hygiene and environment-disinfecting in settings likely to include children, e.g. schools, homes, etc. Second, where possible, we aimed to compare the effectiveness of these techniques and the domains/components they targeted.

Methods:

Literature review.

Main Results:

A total of 29 studies met the inclusion criteria. The majority of interventions were designed to increase hand-hygiene alone (N = 27), and the remaining two interventions were designed to increase both hand-hygiene and environmental-disinfecting. The most used techniques involved shaping knowledge (N = 22) and antecedents (N = 21). Interventions that included techniques targeting four or more theoretical domains and all the capability-opportunity-motivation components were descriptively more effective.

Conclusions:

In alignment with previous findings, the current review encourages future interventions to target multiple theoretical domains, across all capability-opportunity-motivation components. The discussion urges interventionists to consider the appropriateness of interventions in their development, feasibility/pilot, evaluation, and implementation stages.

Impact of Implementation:

The literature review informed a market segmented toolkit produced by Reckitt Benckiser and shared with country markets on 26 February 2021. Schmidtke helped introduce markets to the toolkit at a Webinar that day.