Association between Hospital Nurses’ Perception of Patient Safety Management and Standard Precaution Adherence: A Cross-Sectional Study

Lim, Ji-Hye; Ahn, Jung-Won; Son, Youn-Jung

In the present study, standard precaution adherence rates were relatively high in units with fewer than 20 nurses, such as newborn nurseries, delivery rooms, and psychiatric wards. Shin et al. [30] found that the standard precaution adherence rates of nurses in the newborn nurseries were higher than those of nurses in medical, surgical, and intensive care units. Since newborns are vulnerable to infections, and an environment with a large number of newborns is highly susceptible to the spread of infections, thorough implementation of infection prevention guidelines is important [32] . Such precautions reflect the specificity of departments that care for patients at high risk of infection, which likely result from safety management awareness and increased performance of safety precautions due to continuous infection rate monitoring and training. Additionally, the rate of adherence to standard precautions in this study was significantly lower among nurses who worked in settings where there were more than 15 patients per RN per shift. According to Korean medical laws, the daily patient census per RN is 2.5, which converts to an estimated patient-per-RN rate of approximately 15 per shift. The average estimated patient-per-RN rate per shift in Korean general hospitals from 1996 to 2013 was 16.3 to 21.8, which exceeded the minimum standards required by law [33] . Failure to obtain an adequate number of nurses leads to increased job burden, insufficient nursing time, and decreased job performance ability [34] , and an increased rate of infections [17, 34] . Accordingly, sufficient numbers of appropriately qualified nurses or optimal nurse-to-patient ratio should be considered to increase the rate of adherence to standard precautions for patient safety.