Abstract: OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of applying health belief model on hand hygiene compliance of medical staff, so as to provide references for the improvement of hand hygiene compliance of medical staff. METHODS A total of 90 cases of ICU medical staff and 300 cases of patients from Oct. 2015 to Dec. 2015 were selected, and health belief model was used to intervene their hand hygiene in Jan. 2016. the control group followed the routine hand hygiene standard, and the control group was not intervened. The improvement of hand hygiene compliance and the nosocomial infection rates of the two groups of medical staff were compared before and after the intervention, and the data were analyzed by SPSS 17.0 software. RESULTS The hand hygiene basic knowledge score and professional knowledge score of medical staff were (30.64±6.08) points and (27.40±4.61) points after the intervention, which were all higher than those before the intervention. The hand hygiene compliance of medical staff increased from 66.67% before the intervention to 94.44% after the intervention. The number of colonies of medical staff was (19.10±5.08)CFU before the intervention, which was significantly higher than (3.87±0.67)CFU after the intervention. The nosocomial infection rate of 300 cases of patients was reduced from 5.00% before the intervention to 2.33% after the intervention, which had significant differences (P＜0.05). CONCLUSION Application of the health belief model can effectively improve the hand hygiene compliance of medical staff, benefit of indirect costs, improve the quality of medical care, and obtain a win-win situation of economic and social benefits.