Infection prevention practices and knowledge among health care providers at tertiary care Hospital

Objective: To determine the infection prevention practices and knowledge in health care providers at tertiary care Hospital. Study Design: Cross-sectional study: Setting: This study was conducted at Medicine Department of Peoples University of Medical and health Sciences Nawabshah Duration: Six months from July 2019 to December 2019. Patients and Methods: This cross sectional study was conducted at medicine department with collaboration of other departments at Peoples University of Medical and health Sciences Nawabshah. All the health care providers including doctors, nurses, dispensers and other medical staff were included in the study. Selected individuals were interviewed using a self-made questioner regarding knowledge and practices. Questioner was prepared as per previously published studies and some of the questions were self-designed, which we deemed necessary. Knowledge and practices were categorized in terms of excellent, good, average and poor. All the information was collected via study proforma. Data analysis was done by using SPSS version 20. Result: In this study total 120 healhcare providors were studied. Mean age of study subjects was 28.35 +/- 07.34 years and average experience of health providers was 05.50 +/- 4.33 years. Females were 55.8%, while males were 44.2%. Out of all study subjects, nurses were most common (41.7%), followed by doctors (17.5%), whereas, dispensers were 12.5% and midwives were 14.2%, while 14.2% were others. Most of the study participants had excellent and good knowledge (44.2% and 35.8% respectively) regarding Hospital acquired infection. Excellent prevention practices were found in 34.2% of health care providers, 37.5% were doing good practices, and 9.2% were found with average practices, while 19.2% were observed with poor practice. This average and poor practice was observed due to deficiency of safety materials and ignorance. Conclusion: It was concluded that the infection control practices and its knowledge among the health care providers was absolutely fair; however, there is still a wide scope of improvement with regular educational programs and in-house training.