Exploring factors affecting adherence to infection prevention and control practices by home health care nurses in the domestic setting

Abstract

Author(s): Suhas Ballal, Sukhman Ghumman, Shaikh Adil, Abhinav Mishra, Prakash M. Naregal, Bhupesh Goyal

Background: A set of protocols termed Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) has been developed with home health care in consideration. There is inadequate evidence to support the subpar IPC practice adherence. The study's goal to use the human factors model to investigate how organizational, home environment and individual variables affect IPC behaviors, an increasing number of people are getting medical treatment in their homes as a result of an aging population along with a move towards community-based care.

Method: In addition to handling complicated medical disorders, home health care nurses are essential in providing individualized and patient-centered treatment. Three major home care firms combined their 325 nurses to investigate the association between person, home environment as well as organizational variables and IPC adherence. (Mean=4.42, standard deviation=3.35) Nurses observed many obstacles to IPC activities in patients' homes.

Result: The most common obstacles were an unclean workplace (71.4%) and clutter (75.6%), according to nurses. Nurses indicated that certain IPC supplies were hard to locate (central tendency=3.55 and dispersion=6.87). Like protecting hardware, IPC adherence was aided and hindered by factors related to the domestic setting and the accessibility to IPC materials. With home environment obstacles and IPC supplies present, adhering to IPC was unaffected by agency-provided decision-making tools as well as training. Conclusion: Findings of this study highlights the need to make IPC supplies more readily available and eliminate household impediments as crucial elements of IPC adherence strategies. On another front, the present study suggests IPC strategies might also be useful in oncology therapies, which might be evolving rapidly over the last few years. This could be significant in the supportive or palliative care patients receiving cancer therapy.

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