Knowledge, Practice, and Associated Factors towards Prevention of Surgical Site Infection among Nurses Working in Amhara Regional State Referral Hospitals, Northwest Ethiopia

Abstract

Knowledge and practice of nurses about surgical site infections (SSIs) are not well studied in Ethiopia. This paper contains findings about Northwest Ethiopian nurses' knowledge and practice regarding the prevention of SSIs. The main objective of the study was to assess knowledge, practice, and associated factors of nurses towards the prevention of SSIs. The study was done using a questionnaire survey on randomly selected 423 nurses who were working in referral hospitals during the study period. The study showed that more than half of the nurses who participated in the survey had inadequate knowledge about the prevention of SSIs. Moreover, more than half of them were practicing inappropriately. The most important associated factors include lack of training on evidence based guidelines and sociodemographic variables (age, year of service, educational status, etc.). Training of nurses with the up-to-date SSIs guidelines is recommended.

Jordanian Nurses’ Knowledge of Preventing Surgical Site Infections in Acute Care Settings

“…This result was congruent with [36], who reported that only 6% of three hundred and thirty three nurses who work in surgical wards and operating theatre have had additional exposure to special training courses about surgical site infection prevention where the rest of the study sample (94%) did not. Tentatively, the lack of exposure to special training courses is a challenging problem facing Jordanian nurses nowadays, which may be due to the lack of conducting well-structured special courses regarding evidence based guidelines for the pre-vention of SSIs in Jordanian public governmental hospitals despite of the availability of continuing education units in all of these hospitals, this problem may be refer to defect in continuing education programs implementation which explained by the lack of proper assessment of their nurses educational needs, and the lack of motivation from both the nurses themselves and the hospital administration.…”

“…However, this result supported also by another research findings investigated nurses' knowledge regarding SSIs prevention which was describe the overall knowledge scores as inadequate [36], their results attributed primarily to lack of exposure to special training courses regarding to preoperative and postoperative nursing interventions in order to prevent SSI.…”

“…This claim is congruent with the findings of a recent Jordanian study that was aimed to explore the sources of Jordanian registered nurses' knowledge that used during their practice, it was found that most frequently used sources of knowledge are: firstly, the information gained during nursing education and secondly, the information from policy and procedure manuals [42]. Moreover, it was concordant with a study conducted in 2015 which reported that the basic nurses' knowledge of infection and its control measures come from the general information gained in basic schools of nursing [36]. However, Nurses experience can positively impact their knowledge.…”

Knowledge and practices of nurses regarding nosocomial infection control measures in private hospitals in Sana’a City, Yemen

“…This result is close to the result by Eskander et al [25] which showed that the level of practice was more than 75%. However, it is less than what was obtained by Fashafsheh et al [16] as it was 91.14%, but it is higher than what was found in many other studies [18,20,26,27] as this level of practice accounted for 20, 48.7, 55.3, and 57.5%, respectively. This discrepancy in results could be due to the difference in participants' attitudes towards utilizing infection control measure methods.…”

Assessment of Knowledge and Practice on Infection Prevention among Health Care Workers at Dessie Referral Hospital, Amhara Region, South Wollo Zone, North East Ethiopia

“…Information to policy makers to improve the working condition as a result is limited. Even though Assessment of knowledge, attitude and practice of health care workers on infection prevention in health institution done at Bahir Dar and Addis Ababa [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] to the extent of our knowledge there is no study done on health care workers in Dessie Referral Hospital, Ethiopia. Therefore, this study was aimed to assess the knowledge and practice of health care professionals towards infection prevention in Dessie Referral Hospital, North East Ethiopia.…”