Adherence to Infection Prevention and Control Guidelines among Nurses in Thika Level 5 Hospital.

Abstract

Background; Hospital acquired infections (HAIs), also referred to as Nosocomial infections refer to when a patient gets an infection within the healthcare facility which was not the primary reason for admission. Causes of HAIs include; bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasites in nature. Material and methods; The study adopted a cross-sectional analytical design, the variables under investigations were described. It utilized self- administered questionnaire for data collection among nurses working at Thika level 5 Hospital. The sampling method was census sampling. Data analysis was done using SPSS version 24.0. Results majority of the participants were female, representing 87.5% (n=56), while males were 12.5% (n=8). As for marital statuses, majority were married i.e. 68.8% (n=44), 25% (n=16) were single, 1.6% (n=1) were divorced and 4.7% (n=3) were widowed. Concerning the professional qualifications of the participants, majority were diploma holders, which represented 78.1% (n=50), further shows that, majority of the participants (78.1%, n=50), had trained in government institutions, 17.2% (n=11The male participants were 0.946 times more likely to have good compliance compared to their female counterparts (OR=0.946, CI [0.536- 1.670]). However, these results were not statistically significant at χ2 (1, N=64) =0.040, p=0.842. Results of the Spearman correlation indicated that, there was a positive association between ages of the participants and compliance to IPC guidelines, r (62) = 0.19, p=0.126. Nonetheless, chi squared tests found no statistically significant association between ages of participants and compliance to IPC guidelines at χ2 (3, N=64) =7.836, p=0.076.