KNOWLEDGE, PRACTICE AND ASSOCIATED FACTORS TOWARDS PREVENTION OF SURGICAL SITE INFECTION AMONG NURSES WORKING IN GONDAR AND DEBRE MARKOSE REFERRAL HOSPITALS

Abstract

Introduction: Surgical site infection is a significant clinical problem for hospitalized surgical patients with significant impact on patient morbidity and health care costs. It has a great burden on a surgical patient, in hospital, in the community and in the country at large. Objective: The objective of this study was to assess knowledge, practice and associated factors regarding prevention of surgical site infection among nurses working in Gondar and Debremarkose referral hospitals. Methods: Institution based cross-sectional study was conducted from March 10 – 25 2015 in Gondar and Debre Markos referral hospitals. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 423 nurses from Gondar University and Debre Markos referral hospitals.The data were collected by using pre-tested and structured self-administrated questionnaire. Each questionnaire was checked for completeness, coded manually cleaned and entered in to Epi- info version 3.5.1 and then exported to SPSS for windows version 20.0 for further analysis. And finally logistic regression was done. Results: In this study 40.7% and 48.7% of the study participants had good knowledge and good practice towards prevention of surgical site infection respectively. Being male (AOR= 3.22, 95% CI: 2.09, 4.95), those who served for more than 5 years (AOR = 1.81, 95% CI: 1.12, 2.94), ever taking infection prevention training(AOR = 1.95, 95% CI: 1.27, 2.99 were factors which were significantly associated with knowledge about prevention of surgical site infection while being older than 30 years (AOR= 1.79, 95% CI: 1.08, 2.97), being female (AOR= 2.35, 95% CI: 1.58, 3.50) and being diploma nurse (AOR = 2.26, 95% CI: 1.08, 4.76) were factors which were significantly associated with good practice of surgical site infection prevention activities. Conclusion and Recommendations: Knowledge and practice of the nurse’s regarding surgical site infection prevention is low. Updating the knowledge and practice of the nurses is highly recommended.