Half of NZ workers have seen colleagues not wash their hands after going to the toilet

The rate of hand washing has dropped from the heights of the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo / File

By Mahvash Ikram of RNZ

Nearly half of New Zealand office workers have witnessed someone leaving the work toilet with dirty hands, new research has revealed.

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, New Zealanders were told to wash their hands with soap and water for between 40 and 60 seconds to curb the spread of the virus.

But an OfficeMax survey of almost 500 people shows hand hygiene no longer seems to be a priority in many Kiwi workplaces.

Care sector lead Hazel Wright said standards were slipping.

“Almost half of the workers have witnessed a colleague leaving the bathroom without washing and drying their hands.

“We are definitely seeing a downward trend in the behaviour that we’d seen at the height of the pandemic.”

While hand sanitisers still featured in many offices, she said they were not a substitute for hand washing.

“Hand sanitisers can actually provide a secondary way of decontaminating hands.

“If your hands are visibly dirty or you’ve been to the bathroom, I would recommend washing and drying your hands properly.”

Wet and dangerous

Wright said there was one thing worse than not washing your hands after using the toilet.

“It is so important to dry our hands.

“Damp wet hands, they actually can transfer bacteria 1000 times more than dry hands.”

The OfficeMax survey found 33% of the respondents had witnessed people leaving the toilet without drying their hands properly.

Auckland University microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles also said wet hands could pick up more bacteria.

“Damp hands pick up microbes more easily from surfaces than dry hands.

“For example, if somebody’s been to the toilet and not washed their hands, and they’ve opened the door or whatever as they were leaving, if you’ve got damp hands and they’ve deposited something on the door handle, then you’re more likely to pick it up than if you have dry hands.”

She said it did not take a lot of bad bacteria from the bathroom to make people ill.

“What we know about a lot of microbes that can make you sick is sometimes they don’t need many,” she said.

But it was not just after using the toilet that people must wash their hands.

“If you’ve been out in the soil [or] if you’ve been handling things like raw meat, raw chicken, those kinds of foods, [they] have microbes in them, and some of them can be really quite nasty ones that can give you really quite awful infection.”

‘Social hand-washing’

Wright said sometimes people went through great efforts to pretend to be washing their hands rather than actually using soap and water.

“They might run the tap, rustle hand paper towels or trigger the hand dryer with no real intention of using them and that’s something that is very commonly referred to as social hand washing.”

Organisational psychologist John Eatwell said it was hard to understand why people want to give the impression of hand washing - but research showed people tend to be overly optimistic about their health.

“People have this unfounded optimism that I won’t get caught out by it.

“Of course, it’s very hard for people to realise it.”

He said a better way to encourage hand washing was to make people realise it was also to prevent others from getting sick.

“We’re more likely to do these things for other people than we are for ourselves.

“Interestingly enough, if you actually look at the research on nurses if you say to them ‘wash your hands so you don’t get sick’, about 40% of them will start washing their hands more readily.

“If you say to them, ‘wash your hands so you don’t get the patients sick’, 70% of them start washing their hands.”

Half the respondents of the survey said they did not feel confident about confronting a colleague who they had witnessed leaving the toilet without washing their hands.