2012 Volume 8 Issue 1 Pages 1-16
The author has developed quality indicators of hygiene and infection control, one of the important areas of home care nursing of the elderly. In order to evaluate appropriateness of these quality indicators of infection control, the author mailed the questionnaire of quality indicators of infection control to 1,334 home care nursing stations nationwide and asked for 2 home care nurses at each station to score 1 if they practiced each quality indicator or 0 if they did not. 312 (24.1%) respondents were available. Mean total score was 15.2±2.53 out of 18 and more than 70% of the respondents answered that they practiced 16 of the 18 indicators. Quality indicators that had a low practicing rate were “hand hygiene and gargling between visits" and “use of personal protective equipments”.
Analysis of the relationships between answers regarding quality indicators and the attribute of home care nursing station or the nurses revealed that the association of 5 quality indicators (“obtaining and sharing information with other healthcare professionals”, “hand hygiene and gargling between visits”, “detecting sings of infectious disease and responding appropriately”, “Receiving immunization and health examination” and “planning visits that minimize the chances of infection”) and total score with “years of experience as a home care nurse”. Many respondents felt that the indicators mentioned in the survey included important home care nursing practices, suggesting that these indicators are useful in evaluating quality of infection control practice used in home care nursing.
Since there were a number of associations between quality indicators and attributes other than “years of experience as a home care nurse”, it is necessary to study comments to open-ended questions and to develop better quality indicators and more answerable form of questionnaire to improve the quality of home care nursing practice in the future.
