National Survey on Nurses' Knowedge of Infection Control in General Hospitals and Analysis of Variables to Impact on Their Knowledge

Oh, Hyang Soon

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The ultimate goal of hospital infection control is to decrease the hospital infections. The change of hospital infections were depended closely to the healthcare workers' infection control practice keeping the infection control polices as recommendations. This study tried to measure the knowledge of nurses about the evidence based guidelines of hospital infection control to analysis the variables to impact on their knowledge, and to identify whether evaluation indexes for hospital infection effect on their knowledge.
METHODS
Questionnaire survey was done nationally to 32 general hospitals over 300 beds from August 4, 2003 to the end of December. Only 12 hospitals that over about 10% of total nurses participated in this survey were included in this analysis. Statistical analyses were done using SPSS 12.0 for Windows PC (Chicago, IL, USA).
RESULTS
The mean scores of hospital evaluation indexes of 12 hospitals were in mid range, and the scores of nurses' knowledge about the hospital infection control guidelines were in mid range. By multiple regression analysis and univariate analysis, nurses' knowledge of infection control was found to be strongly associated with every year attendance on infection control education. Hand hygiene evaluation index, infection control for health care workers index and total sum of evaluation indexes were significant to the nurses' knowledge.
CONCLUSION
The significant variable to the nurses' knowledge of hospital infection control was identified as an annual education attendance. The education about hospital infection control should be done mandatory to nurses' education programs every year.