Shaking hands with a hospital worker at the end of his or her shift might be a bad idea. Hospital workers who deal with patients wash their hands less frequently as their workday progresses, probably because the demands of the job deplete the mental reserves they need to follow rules, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. Hengchen Dai, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, led a research team that examined three years of hand-washing data from 4,157 caregivers in 35 U.S. hospitals. The researchers found that "hand-washing compliance rates" dropped by an average of 8.7 percentage points from the beginning to the end of a typical 12-hour shift. The decline in compliance was magnified by increased work intensity.
