Knowledge and practice of safe injection among nurses in tertiary institution in Cross River State, Nigeria

Risks associated with unsafe injection practices among the health care providers necessitated this study to determine the knowledge and practice of safe injection among nurses in university of Calabar Teaching Hospital, Calabar. The specific objectives were to assess injection safety knowledgeby the nurses and to ascertain the practices of safe injection carried out by the nurses. The study adopted a survey design. Purposive sampling technique was used to get one hundred and twenty nine respondents representing 30% of the total population of study. Structured questionnaire and observation checklist were the instruments for data collection. Datas obtained were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The instrument had a correlation coefficient of 0.70 using a test-re-test reliability. The findings revealed that many nurses had good knowledge of injection safety and majority of the nurses practised safe injection. There was a significant relationship between nurses level of knowledge of injection safety and practice of safe injection; when the calculated r-valueof 0.84 was found to be greater than the critical r-value of 0.178. Despite the above, the result also showed that 38.8% of nurses had poor knowledge of injection safety and 40.3% of nurses did not practice safe injection. Based on these results, it was concluded that though majority of the nurses were knowledgeable and practised safe injection, some were not knowledgeable and have not practised safe injection. Thus making continuous education, training and supervision of nurses in relation to injection safety knowledge and practice necessary