Effective hand hygiene is essential for reducing healthcare associated infections. However, compliance of healthcare workers to hand hygiene guidelines are reportedly poor. It is important therefore to instill adequate knowledge and good attitudes and practices at the time of primary training of the healthcare workers. This study was done to identify gaps in knowledge, attitudes and practices to improve existing training programs and enhance good practices and working ethics in the future. A self-administered questionnaire based cross sectional study was done to compare the knowledge, attitudes, practices and satisfaction (KAPS) of facilities between final year medical and nursing students of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Sri Jayewardenepura. Participants had moderate knowledge (77%) but attitudes, practices and satisfaction of facilities of all the participants was overall poor (<50%). However the nursing students had better knowledge (p=0.023), attitudes (p<0.001), practices (p<0.001) and satisfaction of facilities (p<0.001) compared with the medical students. The knowledge, attitudes, practices and satisfaction of facilities of medical and nursing students are unsatisfactory. The study shows the need for further improvement of the existing hand hygiene training programs to address the gaps in knowledge, attitudes and practices. Further, there is a need to improve the facilities available for hand hygiene and make them readily accessible for students at their training centers to enable them to engage in good practices which will be beneficial for them as doctors and nurses in the future.

No abstract

Introduction:National Laboratory Based Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance in urinary isolates conducted by the Sri Lanka College of Microbiologists was started in 2011 in collaboration with the Ministry of Health of Sri Lanka.

The authors have no conflict of interest and no funding was received for this study.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii cause serious infections in health care institutions. Many isolates are multidrug resistant and sometimes resistant even to meropenem. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of an antibiotic is useful to decide on specific treatment and several methods of detecting MIC are in current use. Routine application of such methods is cumbersome for clinical laboratories and the newly introduced VITEK 2 automated method is an attractive alternative. The aims of the study were to compare the performance of the E test and the VITEK 2 system in susceptibility testing of resistant strains of P.aeruginosa and A. baumannii to meropenem and to compare the MIC of four different carbapenem antibiotics for P.aeruginosa and A.baumannii. 75 strains of P.aeruginosa and 25 of A.baumanii were selected randomly from the isolate collection of the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Australia. MIC testing using the E test and the VITEK 2 MIC were performed for each isolate according to the manufacturer's instructions and the CLSI guidelines of June, 2010. MICs obtained by VITEK-2 corresponded closely with those obtained with the E test method. Categorical agreement testing for both organisms was 92% with no major errors and 08% minor errors. We conclude that VITEK 2 is a reliable method to determine MIC to meropenem for P. aeruginosa and A. baumanii. Doripenem sensitivity results can be extrapolated from the meropenem sensitivity results. 29