Abstract
A questionnaire survey of infection prevention measures was conducted to assess the overall state of the institutions and the satisfaction level of the employees at 143 medical institutions of the National Hospital Organization. Claims for payment for infection prevention measures made by the institutions based on the criteria found that, of 109 institutions that responded, 66 claimed Payment 1 (62.9%), 33 claimed Payment 2 (31.4%), and 10 claimed none (9.5%). Institutions that claimed Payment 1 tended to have a larger number of beds for general patients, whereas institutions that claimed Payment 2 or none had fewer beds. Furthermore, the average number of hospitalization days tended to be significantly lower in institutions that claimed Payment 1 (p=0.01). The number of physicians and nurses was greater in institutions that claimed Payment 1 than in those that claimed Payment 2 or none. The proportion of employees who answered they were “satisfied” was significantly higher in institutions that claimed Payment 1, whereas the proportion of employees who answered they were “unsatisfied” was significantly higher in those that claimed none (p=0.01). The improvement factor of “appropriate use of antibiotics” was the highest at 11.0 in institutions that claimed none. Therefore, promoting “appropriate use of antibiotics” was considered to be urgent in those institutions. In institutions with few staff and claimed no payment, the improvement factor of “thorough practice of infection prevention measures” was high (10.2), possibly because such institutions cannot easily allocate full-time staff to the infection control team. These results indicate that investigating the overall condition of institutions and the satisfaction level of the employees for infection prevention measures enables evaluation of their infection control measures and determination of points for improvement.
