Infection control by nurses in selected hospitals in Anambra State, Nigeria

Abstract

Background: Client safety in the health-care environment requires the reduction of microorganism transmission. Infection control practices are directed at controlling or eliminating source of infection in the health-care agency, home, or communities to reduce the occurrence and transmission of infectious diseases. Among health workers, nurses spend the greatest time in caregiving setting. Nurses' involvement in infection control measures will yield positive results in infection prevention and control in hospitals. Aim: To evaluate the knowledge, attitude, and practice of nurses in the state on infection control and barriers to practice to generate information that would guide future interventions to scale up practices. Methods: It is a cross-sectional study of descriptive design. Multistage sampling technique was adopted. The hospitals in the state were stratified according to ownership - federal, state, mission, and private. Using balloting, three categories of hospitals were randomly selected out of the four. One hospital each was selected from the three main cities in the state based on federal, state, and mission ownership, respectively. Instrument for data collection was a self-structured questionnaire, which was validated and with a reliability value of 0.82 computed on ten nurses in a pilot study. The population of nurses in the three hospitals was small (310). Using convenient sampling method, nurses on morning duty were selected. A sample of 202 nurses based on shift duty, out of the 310 nurses from the three selected hospitals constituted the study population even though only 197 out of the 202 nurse participants returned their questionnaire. Descriptive and inferential statistics using Spearman's rho correlation were applied. Results: Out of the 197 respondents, 84 (42.6%) responded that their hospital has infection control unit and 66 (34.1%) stated that they have infection control committee in their hospitals. Respondents with a knowledge score above 60% were only 20 (10.2%), but 170 (86.3%) and 120 (60.9%) had attitude and practice score above 60%, receptively. Only 5 respondents (2.5%) strongly agreed that hand washing is the key to infection control. Conclusion: There is a need to explore the discrepancy between knowledge, attitude, and practice. Facility monitoring is vital to effective infection control practices and should be the focus of intervention.