Facilitating Nursing Students Compliance with Standard Precautions through their Own Reflection

Compliance with Standard precautions is the most important factor in controlling hospital acquired infections, so it becomes a topic of high concern for all health workers. Associate nursing students who come into contact with patient blood and body fluids may be exposed to fatal infections. This raised the need to improve the students compliance with standard precautions through their own reflection, proposed this active approach will incorporate cognitive, emotional and behavioral potential abilities of the students. This study was carried out to determine the effect of students own reflection on their compliance with standard precautions. A pre - and post- intervention study with a 14-week follow-up utilizing reflection in action and on action model was conducted. A purposive sample includes 30 students, who were enrolled in the associate nursing program, agreeing to participate in the study. Compliance with standard precautions significantly increased during the intervention. Hepatitis B vaccine coverage among the participants increased from 68% preintervention to 100% at 14-week follow-up. Needle stick and sharp injury exposure declined among the participants from 57% pre-intervention to 4% at 14-weeks follow-up. The outcomes of this study provide evidence that the nursing students own reflection facilitates their compliance with standard precautions, so reflection as a learning strategy helped nursing students learn from their own experiences and improve their practice.