A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement fits campus hand-sanitiser dispensers with covert usage counters, and finds Facilities' hygiene-compliance score moves with refill visits far more reliably than with actual use.
A 14-week instrument-validation study ties Facilities' hygiene-compliance score to refill visits far more closely than to how often a dispenser is actually pressed
Twenty-four hand-sanitiser dispensers across six campus buildings spent this term reporting two different numbers: the one Facilities already collects, and one nobody at Facilities knew was running alongside it.
A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement fitted each dispenser with a covert internal-actuation counter and ran it for fourteen weeks against Facilities’ existing refill log and the building-level hygiene-compliance score built from it. Dr Anouk Mensah and Dr Bram Ntuli found the two measures barely moved together.
We are, it turns out, considerably better at auditing our own schedules than at auditing use. That’s a useful thing for a measurement school to learn about one of its own indicators.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The administration building supplied the clearest split: refilled on schedule throughout, its dispensers logged the lowest usage index of the six buildings audited. The library, at the other end, saw refill frequency and actual use move together almost exactly. Overall, the two measures showed only a weak association, and illness-related absence tracked neither one.
Dr Ntuli, whose own work follows what a standing review format quietly leaves off the record, thanked the building staff who let the counters run unremarked all term, calling them “the reason the blind spot finally got a number attached to it.”
Facilities has not indicated whether the compliance score will be adjusted. The University has filed the result as the first entry in what it is calling its instrument-validation record — a shelf reserved for the moments one of its own indicators gets checked against the thing it was built to track.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.zj8ph6.