Introduction:

Hand hygiene is a simple and effective intervention in breaking the chain of infection transmission.

Objetive:

To understand nurses’ perception on hand hygiene of nurses, children and their caregivers, in a pediatric unit.

Methods:

A descriptive study, framed in the qualitative paradigm was conducted. The data were obtained by semi-structured interview and their analysis using the Bardin content analysis method. A sample of 15 nurses was recruited from a pediatric inpatient service. Participants were mostly female, with an average age of 37.5 years.

Results:

Two categories emerged from the discourse analysis: conditioning factors of hand hygiene adherence, with subcategories related to nurses (four), children (four); and the caregivers (five); and strategies to improve hand hygiene adherence and its subcategories related to nurses (four); children and their caregivers (three).

Conclusion:

It is cruicial to raise awareness and training the teams and users of health units for this problem and how to minimize it. The planning of multimodal interventions to promote hand hygiene in a paediatric context emerges as a determining factor to optimize this practice.

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