Determining The Professional And Organizational Factors In Nurses’ Compliance With Isolation Precautions

Abstract

Objective: This research was designed as a descriptive and cross-sectional one aimed to determine the level of compliance with isolation precautions of the nurses who were working in a public hospital. Methods: The study population consisted of 270 nurses working in a university hospital. Of these nurses, 139 who volunteered to participate in the study comprised the study sample., using the sociodemographic questionnaire prepared by the researchers and the 18-item "complian-ce with isolation precautions scale." The minimum and maximum possible scores anticipated to be obtained from the scale were 18 and 90 points respectively. High scores indicated that the nurses'compliance with isolation precautions are high. To analyze the data, numbers, percentiles, t-test, Krusskall-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney U test and anaysis of variance (ANOVA) were used. Results: The mean score of the nurses obtained from the compliance with isolation precautions scale was 66.75±11.80 points. The mean scores of the participants obtained from the subdimensions of the scale including the route of infection , practitioner-patient safety, environmental control and hand-hygiene/glove use-were 21.52±4.55, 18.20±3.80, 16.63±3.98 and 10.25±2.26 points, respectively. The difference between the mean scores for the compliance with isolation precautions scale in terms of the nurses' educatio-nai level and length of service was found to be statistically significant (p<0.05). The nurses who were working in the intensive care unit, who had education on isolation and who were charge nurses obtained higher mean scores from the compliance with isolation precautions scale, but the differences were not statistically significant (p>0.05). Conclusion: The nurses' compliance with isolation precautions can be said to be at a satisfactory level. Training programs on isolation precautions involving the issues which the nurses indicated their poor' compliance should be developed and this training should be provided for these nurses.