Knowledge and Compliance with Standard Precautions amongst Healthcare Workers in Selected Hospitals in Rivers State, Nigeria

Background: Standard precautions (SPs) in the hospital are very important in the reduction of health care workers’ exposure to occupational health hazards but most hospitals are used to reactive rather than proactive safety practices. The effect of reactive safety practices is overwhelming to health care workers, hospitals and the society. Thus, this study assessed health care workers’ knowledge and compliance with standard precautions.

Materials and Methods: Descriptive cross-sectional design and proportionate stratified random sampling method was adopted and a sample size of 391was selected using Taro-Yamane formula. The study relied on a structured questionnaire to elicit information from respondents and a reliability of 0.87 was obtained. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used with the aid of statistical package for social science (SPSS) software version 21.

Results: Healthcare workers’ (HCWs) have fair knowledge of SPs and poor compliance with SPs. Also, there is significant association between HCWs’ knowledge of SPs and gender, marital status, years of experience and job category in the hospitals (p < 0.05). Consequently, there is significant association between compliance with SPs and gender, years of experience and job categories in the hospitals (p < 0.05).

Conclusion: There is great need for strong advocacy on knowledge of SPs and compliance with SPs in the hospitals to curb increasing occupational health hazards. The Nigeria government and hospital managements should develop an all-encompassing integrated SPs policies, strategies and procedures consistent with global best practices.