Impact of Educational Interventions on the Awareness Regarding Hospital Infection Control Practices Among the Medical Students

Background: More than 1.4 million people all over the world are suffering from infections acquired during hospital stays . Awareness regarding infection prevention and control techniques are important to reduce the burden of such infections, ensuring better quality healthcare. Infection control education is a core component of infection control programs. Objectives: To assess the knowledge and awareness of Medical students in a tertiary care teaching hospital in Central India and to evaluate the impact of educational interventions in eliminating any existing gaps in the same. Methods: This interventional study based on self-administered questionnaires (Google forms) involved fifty medical Students who were administered a pre-structured validated questionnaire as pre-test and post-test before and after an induction training program on infection prevention & control measures. The impact of the educational intervention was evaluated by determining the learning gain. Result: The study reveals a highly significant improvement in knowledge levels after training sessions (p<0.0001). Before training most of the study subjects (68%) showed poor levels of knowledge, 22% exhibited moderate levels while only 10% were found to have good levels of knowledge. After training 36% of trainees showed good levels of knowledge, 40% exhibited moderate levels while only 24% were left with poor knowledge. Conclusion: While evaluating the impact of training in this study, we have found a statistically significant absolute learning gain and a medium level of class average normalized learning gain. These findings prove the effectiveness of such targeted training sessions as an important strategic tool in preventing healthcare-associated infections.