Vol. 2, Issue 2, Part A (2025)

Hand hygiene remains one of the most effective and affordable public health interventions for preventing diarrhoeal diseases, respiratory infections, and other hygiene-related illnesses in rural settings, where the burden of infectious diseases continues to be disproportionately high ^[1-3]. Despite ongoing national and global efforts, rural households often struggle to adopt consistent handwashing practices due to limited hygiene literacy, socio-cultural influences, low perceived susceptibility, and inadequate access to personalised hygiene education ^{[9, 10]}. Community Health Nurses (CHNs) play an essential role in addressing these gaps by delivering interpersonal, household-level hygiene awareness visits, which have been shown to build trust, strengthen health literacy, and promote behavioural adoption ^{[4, 5]}. Door-to-door hygiene visits allow CHNs to provide tailored demonstrations, reinforce critical handwashing times, correct misconceptions, and offer behavioural cues in real-world home contexts—an approach strongly supported by global evidence highlighting the effectiveness of household-based hygiene interventions ^[6-8]. This research evaluates the effectiveness of structured CHN-led home visits in improving handwashing knowledge, frequency of practice, and compliance with critical handwashing moments. Using a quasi-experimental design, significant improvements were observed in the intervention group compared with the control group, consistent with previous research demonstrating that personalised, behaviour-focused hygiene interventions lead to meaningful reductions in infection risks and improved long-term behavioural outcomes ^[11-14]. Overall, the findings emphasise the need to integrate CHN-led door-to-door hygiene programmes into rural health strategies to support sustainable hygiene behaviour change and reduce preventable infections.