Objectives: The purpose of this study is to investigate the cognition and practice of infection control in the dental hygienists. Methods: A self-reported questionnaire was completed by 220 dental hygienists in Busan and Gyeongnam from August 1 to 31, 2014. The questionnaire was adapted from Nam. The questionnaire consisted of four questions of the general characteristics of the subjects, two questions of infection control factors, four questions of clinic environment, 50 questions of awareness of infection control, and 50 questions of infection control practice. Cronbach's alpha in the awareness of infection control was 0.958 and that in infection control practice was 0.950. Results: The dental hygienists in the large scale hospitals tended to have higher score of cognition and practice of infection control thatn those in the small scale hospitals(p<0.001). Small scale hospitals tended to have lower infection rate than the large scale hospitals. The education for the infection control guideline reduced the infection prevalence rate. Conclusions: In order to reduce the infection prevalence rate, it is necessary to educate the dental hygienists continuously and to provide the infection control guideline to the dental clinics.

The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire has long been used in the healthcare industry to measure healthcare workers' attitudes toward patient safety culture; as a result, it has been translated into a variety of languages, including Korean. Recently, with the help of item response theory, we realised we do not need the original 41 items of the questionnaire to guarantee accuracy, so we reduced the instrument to a 23-item survey. Except for the stress recognition domain, every domain functioned well. We suspect the stress recognition domain did not fare well due to cultural differences. Stress recognition refers to individuals understanding that significant stress can lead to a greater probability to make an error. However, healthcare workers, especially those in Asian countries such as Taiwan and Korea, do not accept such an idea. Rather, we found that such workers believe they should finish their work, regardless of how tired they are. They believe that admitting to stress makes them appear weak and can lead to them being fired. As the chasm between these two concepts cannot easily be crossed, we ultimately decided to remove the stress recognition domain from this second version of the survey. In sum, the new version of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire contains 23 items across five domains. Their psychometric property was tested using confirmatory factor analysis, and information function curves helped us determine which items should be retained in the new instrument by visualising the behaviour of items and domains.

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