Knowledge and compliance with standard precautions among registered nurses: A cross-sectional study.

Background: Nurses and patients are often exposed to various types of infections during their clinical practice. Knowledge and compliance with standard precautions are essential to prevent hospitals associated infections and protect patients as well as medical workers from exposure to infectious agents.

Aims: This study aimed to assess the level of knowledge, level of compliance, and associated factors toward compliance with standard precautions among registered nurses in the North of Jordan.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted at three hospitals in the North of Jordan. Two were public hospitals and one was a university-affiliated hospital. A questionnaire concerning the knowledge and compliance with the standard precaution guidelines was distributed among 300 registered nurses of whom 266 completed the questionnaire (response rate 88.7%).

Results: 53% of the participants were from governmental hospitals and 57.1% were females. The age median of them was 30 years (IQR = 28-32). The majority of the participants were medical/surgical RNs (33.1%) while only 8.3% of them were from the pediatric/gynecology departments. The overall knowledge score was 16.27 (SD = 3.15), and the total compliance score was 49.15 (SD = 12.36). Besides, the study showed a moderate positive correlation between the level of knowledge, experience in years, and the standard precautions compliance (r = 0.387, p = 0.01), (r = 0.341, p = 0.01), respectively.

Conclusions: standard precautions are the basic level of the infection control process. The participants may possess satisfactory knowledge and compliance levels. However, more training programs and more focusing on the standard precautions by educational institutes are needed for nurses to improve their knowledge and compliance with infection-control standard precautions.