Introduction: The correct hand washing technique remains one of the important practices in the area of health, in the operating room this routine practice becomes essential because we avoid infections at the surgical site and the goal is to evaluate the staff health that performs the surgical hand washing technique in the area of operating rooms, through an observational instrument and the realization of taking hand cultures after performing this procedure. Materials and methods: A checklist of 8 items was carried out and applied by observation to the staff performing surgical hand washing. Subsequently crops were taken in two times, the first in the palm of the hand and in the nail bed of the 3 interdigital space of the right hand, the second crop was taken at 30min of initiated surgery in the same sites. Results: out of 71 (100%) health people who have the checklist applied, it was obtained that the staff (85%), perform the surgical technique of hand washing correctly and 14.9% skip some steps of this technique. As for the microbiological samples (cultures) taken to staff (35) were reported without development of aerobic mesophilics, without coliform development and without development for fungi in the staff. Conclusions: Although the WHO-proposed handwashing surgical technique differs from some points of the technique performed at CEMENAV, staff know the importance of the attachment of this technique and practice it with mostly respect ingestry the principles of asepsis, and it was possible to corroborate with the microbiological tests that were performed on the personnel, that there is no development of microorganisms after carrying out the two tests.
