Health professionals and their patients are subject to cross-contamination and potential exposure to harmful infectious diseases. A common form of cross-contamination is through dental procedures without proper instrument care and lack of hand hygiene. The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate the published research on the adherence of educators and students in academic dental institutions to hand hygiene procedures. This systematic review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and included articles collected in the Cochrane, LILACS, PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. The initial search identified 1,196 articles. Ultimately, three studies were included for qualitative synthesis and two for the meta-analysis. The three articles had similar characteristics of observational hand hygiene research involving educators and dental students. In all three, hand hygiene among dental students did not reach 50% of the total number of opportunities, which is a troubling result. Although the hand hygiene rate of educators was higher than that of dental students, these findings point to a need to further promote hand hygiene to future professionals to avoid cross-contamination between health professionals and patients.
Keywords: cross-contamination; dental education; hand hygiene; infection control; infectious disease; systematic review.