ABSTRACT
Health care workers are at risk of various occupational hazards such as blood borne and other pathogens infections in the hospital in the course of carrying out their duties due to exposure to needle sticks and sharps injuries (NSSI) and other sharps related injuries during the process of recapping, disassembly and inappropriate disposal of used syringes and other sharps. There are over 20 Blood borne pathogens transmitted through NSSI including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV). In order to reduce the occurrence of these hazards, the CDC came up with the concept of Standard Precautions (SPs). Compliance with SPs is the recognized efficient means to prevent and control Hospital associated infections in both the patients and health workers, however health care workers compliance with SPs has been found to be sub-optimal worldwide. This study aimed to assess healthcare worker's compliance with standard precautions and determine factors affecting their compliance A cross sectional survey of 332 health care workers involved in clinical services from 19 Government health facilities selected from the six area councils in Abuja was undertaken. A self-administered semi-structured questionnaire was distributed to study the factors affecting health care workers compliance with SPs. Data was analysed using Epi-info 7. The mean age of the respondents was 37.2 � 8.28 and about two third 223(67.2%) of the respondents were females. Knowledge was above average in 274 (82.6%) of the respondents out of which 141 (42.5%) had good knowledge and 133 (40.1%) had fair knowledge. Majority of the respondents (253 (76.2%)) were compliant with SPs although most 204 (61.4%) of those compliant falls within average level of compliance. The factors significantly affecting health care worker's compliance with SPs in this study were: Health facility type (p=0.022) and years of practice of profession (p=0.044)). Multivariate analysis showed that level of health facility is a determinant of health care worker's compliance with SPs i.e xiii Health care workers working in primary health facilities were two times less likely to be compliant with SPs than those in tertiary health facilities (AOR = 0.476, 95%C.I. = 0.253 - 0.892). This study therefore recommends that hospital management board should pay more attention to health care workers in primary health facilities by setting up functional infection control committees that will conduct regular training and retraining on infection prevention and control and ensure constant availability of commodities for SPs such as water, gloves, face masks, hand sanitizers, goggles, etc Key words: Standard Precautions, Compliance, Healthcare workers.