Abstract:
Background: A sharp injury is an accidental skin penetrating with an instrument that is potentially contaminated with the body fluid of another person. Despite a growing awareness of the dangers posed by sharp injuries to healthcare profession, there is a shortage of evidence on magnitude and factors affecting sharp injuries among health care professionals in Yeka Sub city of Addis Ababa.
Objective: The main aim of the study was to assess the magnitude of sharp injuries and its associated factors among health professionals working in public health facilities of Yeka sub city, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Methods: Facility based cross sectional study was conducted on 395 randomly selected health professionals working in the public health facility in Yeka Sub city of Addis Ababa.
A standardized questionnaire was used to collect data by healthcare professional. The collected data was checked for completeness, cleaned, coded manually and entered Epi Data V.3.2. Cleaned data was exported from Epi DATA to Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 20.0 for analysis. Descriptive statistics was computed and presented in the form of texts and tables. Multivariable binary logistic regression model was used to identify the relative importance of each predictor to the dependent variable by controlling for the effect of other variables.
Results: The magnitude of sharp injury in the last 12 months prior to the study was 29.3%.Not taking infection prevention training (AOR: 8.5, 95% CI: 4.24 _17.04), having less service year in the health facility(AOR:4.58 95%CI: 2.33 _8.99), having work overload (AOR: 2.88, 95% CI: 1.41 _ 5.9), working under shift (AOR:3.24, 95% CI: 1.52_6.90)and being dissatisfied with currently assigned job (AOR:7.25 95%CI:3.32_15.81) were associated with sharp injury.
Conclusion and recommendations: This study revealed that 29.3% of the respondents had sharp injury at least once per year; the magnitude of sharp injury is high in the study area. Working in the hospital, presence of work overload, lack of training on infection prevention, working by shift, lack of job satisfaction, presence of sleep disturbance at duty and less work experience were found to be the major identified risk factors. Therefore, health care planners should formulate strategies to improve the working conditions for healthcare professionals and increase their adherence to universal precautions
