The Effect of AI-delivered Patient Education on Patients' Willingness to Participate in Hand Hygiene: The Mediating Role of Role Stress

Hand hygiene plays an important role in patient safety and infection prevention and control. In practice, healthcare organisations increasingly ask patients to remind healthcare workers to perform hand hygiene, which then improves the hand hygiene compliance rate of healthcare workers. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach and found that patient education significantly increases patients’ willingness to participate. However, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in this process remains understudied. Concurrently, extant studies have yet to reveal the mechanism between patient education and patients' willingness to participate. Based on role stress theory, we conducted two scenario experiments and proved that AI patient education can significantly improve patients' willingness to participate in hand hygiene, while role ambiguity, role overload and role conflict play a mediating role in this process. Our findings have implications for research and practice that can help promote patient participation in hand hygiene.