1205. Healthcare Personnel Knowledge, Attitudes, and Beliefs Towards Infection Prevention and Control Measures for Protection from Respiratory Infections

Abstract

Background. Healthcare personnel (HCP) are exposed to many individuals with respiratory illness while providing care. Because children more frequently present for care with respiratory infections compared with older individuals, we hypothesized that HCP working in pediatric settings might experience greater risks of respiratory infection than HCP working in adult settings. The Respiratory Protection Effectiveness Clinical Trial (ResPECT) prospectively compared respiratory protection among HCP at seven health systems across the United States between 2011 and 2015. Methods. Swabs were collected from asymptomatic participants twice each respiratory season. Swabs were collected from symptomatic HCP within 24 hours of self-reported respiratory symptoms and again if participants were still symptomatic after 7 days. PCR confirmation for 13 viruses was done by a single laboratory. We compared hazards of multiple outcomes associated with respiratory infections among HCP working in pediatric clinics and HCP working in clinics that care for adults. Results. The main outcomes were risk factors for symptomatic and asymptom-atic viral respiratory infections. A total of 5,180 participant-seasons were evaluated from 2011-2015, 1,130 of which worked solely with children. There were 403 and 1,162 incidents of asymptomatic and symptomatic PCR-confirmed respiratory infection , respectively. Risk factors associated with respiratory infection in the entire cohort included age, race, vaccination status, smoking status, wearing contacts, total household members, study site, and age of patient population. HCP working exclusively with pediatric patients had 1.5 (95% CI 1.2-1.8) times the rate of respiratory virus infection compared with HCP working only with adults. HCP who worked with both populations had 1.4 times (95% CI: 1.2-1.7) the rate of infection with respiratory viruses. Conclusion. The risk of respiratory infections was increased among HCP that saw children. This risk was not mitigated by working only part-time with children and extended to those who identified as working with both adult and pediatric populations. Our findings highlight the need to target interventions in pediatric settings to decrease HCP acquisition of respiratory infections. Background. Healthcare personnel (HCP) knowledge and attitudes toward Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) measures are important determinants of practices that can protect them from acquisition of infectious diseases from patients. We aimed to describe HCP knowledge and attitudes concerning IPC measures over time in the context of a clinical trial. Methods. ResPECT was a multi-center, multi-season cluster randomized clinical trial designed to compare the effectiveness of medical masks (MM) and N95 respirators (N95) for preventing acute respiratory illnesses in HCP employed in outpatient clinical settings. At the beginning of each respiratory virus season, participants completed a survey instrument to measure IPC knowledge. At the beginning and end of each season participants completed a survey to assess attitudes and beliefs about IPC measures, especially MM and N95. Results. A pre-study and post-study survey pair was available for 88.1% of participant seasons. There were no significant differences in demographic variables or