Precauções de Contato: Conhecimento e comportamento dos profissionais de um centro de terapia intensiva em um hospital geral de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The occurrence of nosocomial infection is favored by the dissemination of microorganisms, which is one of the issues of great concern to hospitals in the entire world. Therefore, infection control methods must be adopted with rigor by health workers. The general objective of thisstudy was to evaluate the knowledge and behavior of health workers in an intensive care unit (ICU), in contact precautions for nosocomial infection. It is an epidemiological cross sectional study with a quantative approach. The study included all the members of a surgery ICU team. The criteria for inclusion of the participants were: to be a member of the ICU; to be actively involved in care-giving during the data collection period and agree to participate in the study. The data were collected in August 2007 through face-to-face interviews, with open and closed questions. The data was treated with descriptive statistics with frequency distribution. Knowledgeand behavior were treated as dichotomist variables: adequate and inadequate. Comparisons were made between groups, according to knowledge and behavior, using the Pearsons qui-squared test and the Fisher exact test, when applicable. The association between knowledge, behavior and other variables was carried out through a multivariate analysis, using the classification tree through the CHAID algorithm, and respective results were validated through logistics regression.One hundred and two workers took part, including nursing technicians (54.9%), nurses (12.7%), preceptor physicians (10.8%), trainee physical therapists (8.8%), physical therapist preceptors (7.8%) and resident physicians (4.9%). The workers were mainly women (73.5%). Their agevaried from 22 to 57 years old, at an average of 31.5 years, with a predominance of ages 22 to 27 (27.5%.). Most workers had qualified five to eleven years before (30.7%). Most had up to three years (51%) experience in the hospital and in the ICU (56.9%). According to the answers to the questionnaire, only 36.3% of those interviewed had adequate knowledge about measures to control nosocomial infection and 51% had adequate behavior with regard to nosocomial infectioncontrol measures. In the multivariate analyses, no variables were associated with knowledge. On the other hand, the nursing workers were associated with adequate behavior both in the classification tree and the logistics regression. The nursing workers displayed more adequatebehavior than other workers. There was no statistically significant association between knowledge and behavior (p = 0.196). The results of this study show the need to implement guidance activities to bring a balance between theory and practice of health workers on nosocomial infection prevention measures in other to improve knowledge and behavior.