Health care personnel compliance with standards of eye and face protection and mask usage in operating rooms

Abstract

Background: Personal protection equipments (PPEs) should be easily accessible to decrease contact with infecting factors
and also should be used purposefully to effectively keep the health care personnel in a safe distance from the patient blood
and body fluid which can easily infect the operating rooms personnel. This study aimed to find the operating rooms' personnel
compliance with standards of two PPE items, mask and eye/face protection and the effective factors on their compliance.
Methods: This was a descriptive correlative study. Sampling method was simple and 250 operating room personnel were
selected. Data were collected by a questionnaire consisting of three parts; demographic characteristics and standards usage
of mask and eye/face protection. Participants were divided into four groups of perfect, favorable, relatively acceptable and
deficient based on their scores of their compliance with standards in the second and third parts of the questionnaire.
Results: The favorable compliance with standard usage of mask and eye/face protection was 33.9% and 46.4%, respectively.
Participants said that lack of mask and eye/face protection was the main effective factor for their compliance. There was
no significant relationship between work place and educational degree, and the personnel's compliance with standard usage
of eye/face protection and mask.
Conclusion: Compliance with standard usage of mask is not acceptable and is almost in agreement with other studies. The
important point is that there is no significant difference between personnel's compliance with standard usage of mask and
eye/face protection in high risk and low risk environments.
Key words: Compliance with standards, personal protection equipments, effective factors, operating room personnel