Participants

All individuals older than 18 years of age were eligible to participate. Consecutive individuals entered into the Faculty of Medicine, Khon Kaen University, were asked to participate in the study. These included both HCWs and non-HCWs. HCWs in the study population was defined as the participants who delivers care and services to the sick and ailing either directly as doctors and nurses or indirectly as aides, helpers, and laboratory technicians. While, non-HCWs were the participants who did not have a direct care with the patients. A total number of 805 participants were enrolled based on the sample size calculation. The study was planned to determine the proportion of hand eczema cases that occurred during the time in which the questionnaires were answered. An estimated of proportion (p) was 0.4 from the previous study.¹⁰ A confidence coefficient of 95% was desired, and an absolute precision (d) of 0.04 was used.

The study was approved as exemption research by the institutional review board of the Khon Kaen University, Human Research Ethics Committee (#{"type":"entrez-nucleotide","attrs":{"text":"HE631406","term_id":"378884030","term_text":"HE631406"}}HE631406).