Assessing baseline knowledge and practices of injection safety among primary health care workers in Cross River State, Nigeria: a cross-sectional urban-rural comparative study

INTRODUCTION: unsafe injection practices are commonplace in low-income countries, and place health care workers at risk of blood-borne infections. A safe injection strategy requires a synchronized approach to deal with change in behavior of users and service providers towards safer practice. There is general lack of data on injection safety practices in Cross River State. This was a baseline study to compare the knowledge and practice of safe injection practices among primary health care (PHC) workers in urban and rural health facilities in Cross River State, Nigeria. METHODS: this was a cross-sectional comparative study among PHC workers in randomly selected rural and urban Local Government Areas (LGAs). Using multistage sampling technique, a total of 320 respondents: 160 from the urban LGAs and 160 from the rural LGAs were interviewed. Semi-structured interviewer administered questionnaires were used to obtain data. Data analysis was done using STATATM version 14.0. Associations were tested using Chi square, and multivariate logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: in this study, there was no difference in the baseline knowledge (58.8% vs. 55.0%, P=0.499) and practice (33.1% vs. 34.4%, P=0.813) of injection safety between PHC workers in the urban and rural locations. In the multivariate logistic regression model, the senior health workers had a two-fold increased odds of practicing safe injection compared to their junior counterparts [OR=2.21 (95% CI: 1.28,3.84)]. CONCLUSION: in both the urban and rural locations, there was good knowledge but poor practice of injection safety among respondents in the LGAs; hence, the need to organize periodic injection safety training and retraining of PHC workers targeting junior workers to improve on the practices of injection safety.