Knowledge and Compliance of Nursing Students regarding Infection Control Standard Precautions during their Clinical Training

Background: Infection is one of the most important problems in health care services worldwide; also, it constitutes one of the most important causes of morbidity and mortality associated with clinical, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Nursing students are more exposed to infections duringtheir clinical training, so they need to improve their performance related to infection control measures. Standard precautions are set of measures formulated to prevent transmission of blood borne pathogens when providing health care. Aim of the study: Assess knowledge and compliance of nursing students regarding infection control standard precautions during their clinical training. Study design: An analytic comparative cross-sectional study was used for this study. Subjects and method: The study was conducted on 450 nursing studentsof second, third and fourth academic yearsat the Faculty of Nursing Tanta University. Toolsof data collection: Tool I: Structured questionnaire sheet which consisted of two parts. Part 1: - Socio-demographiccharacteristics of the nursing students. Part 2: -Standard precautions knowledge. Tool II: Part 1: Used for measuringcompliance with standard precautions. Part 2: measuring factors affecting the compliance with standard precautions. Results: The mean of ages of the studied students were 20.210.619, 21.671.047, and 21.740.65 years for second, third and fourth academic years respectively. The total mean scores of knowledge were (13.043.072, 13.551.144, and 12.242.579) respectively. The total compliance score in the studied group were 30.915.844, 30.753.183 and 29.675.142 in the second, third and fourth years of students respectively. Also majority (89.3%, 94.7 % and 82.7% respectively) of the studied groups (second, third and fourth years) had good practice score of compliance, also there werea statistical significance difference between the levels of knowledge scores and also between the levels of compliance scores P< 0.05. Conclusion and recommendations: This study showed that there was statistically significance difference in relation to total score of knowledge and compliance score in the three studied years. However, the periodic refresher in-service training courses and regular lectures should be provided to nursing students in order to keep them of updating knowledge and practice regarding standard precaution measures.