The Effect of CBAHIon Knowledge and Practice of Standard Precautions among Healthcare Workers in Medina

Background: Standard precautions (SPs) establish the essential procedure for nosocomial disease control in primary health care centers. CBAHI’s Mission is to help all healthcare services, through accreditation, to constantly consent to quality and patient wellbeing guidelines on hospital infection control. Objectives: This research was therefore innovated to assess the effect of CBAHI accreditation on information and practice of infection control standard precautions among these health care staff. Methods: This research was conducted as a comparative cross-sectional study in primary health care centers (PHCCs) in Medinah in KSA, during the period from June 2019 to March 2020, including 322 randomly selected HCWs (162 HCWs from CBAHI accredit PHCCs and 160 HCWs CBAHI non-accredit PHCCs). They were asked to fill a self-administrated survey evaluating their information and practice of standard precautions. Results: With a response rate of 68.2%, it is clear that the almost of participants in both groups have moderate and high knowledge level (66.8% and 26.7%, respectively) with regard to SPs. There is not any statistically significant distinction between both groups the total information score or knowledge score regarding most SPs items except for environmental cleaning and waste disposal that were significantly higher among CBAHI accredit group. Significantly, good compliance to the practice of IC standard precautions was identified between both groups (99.4% and 86.3%, respectively). Conclusion: CBAHI accreditation has a significantly positive effect upon health care staff compliance to perform infection control standard precautions, but with limited effect on their knowledge level. There remains a clear need for continuing CBAHI accreditation programs to promote awareness and encourage adherence with best practice towards reducing nosocomial infections.