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

This study demonstrated that there was a significant positive correlation between nurses' standard precaution adherence and their perceptions of patient safety management. More importantly, the multiple linear regression results revealed that nurses' perceptions of patient safety management were only significantly associated with adherence to standard precautions after adjusting for other covariates. As nurses' perceptions of patient safety management may affect nursing activities [14, 26, 35] , raising nurses' awareness about patient safety management must be prioritized to increase adherence to standard precautions. Particularly, practical guidelines and continuous training to increase nurses' positive awareness, interest, and willingness to participate in patient safety management can contribute to improvements in practicing standard precautions [36] . Despite no observed significant relationship between nurse-to-patient ratio and adherence to standard precautions in hierarchical analysis, our correlation matrix showed that nurse-to-patient ratio was weakly associated with adherence to standard precautions. According to a recent review [37] , low adherence to standard precautions may be caused by inappropriate work conditions (excessive workload and reduced teams). Thus, intervention studies are needed in future to improve work conditions such as appropriate staff sizing.