Healthcare worker mental models of patient care tasks in the context of infection prevention and control.

Objective: Understanding the cognitive determinants of healthcare worker (HCW) behavior is important for improving the use of infection prevention and control (IPC) practices. Given a patient requiring only standard precautions, we examined the dimensions along which different populations of HCWs cognitively organize patient care tasks (ie, their mental models).

Design: HCWs read a description of a patient and then rated the similarities of 25 patient care tasks from an infection prevention perspective.