EVALUATION OF HOSPITAL PROCEDURES AND PHYSICIANS’ BEHAVIOR ON PREVENTION OF RESPIRATORY INFECTIONS IN HOSPITALS IN INNER MONGOLIA; A CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY USING UNANNOUNCED STANDARDIZED PATIENTS

Yijing Xie^{1, 2}, Yancun Fan¹, Xingsheng Zhao³, Yan Guo³ and Hutcha Sriplung^{2, *}

¹Inner Mongolia Medical University, Hohhot, inner Mongolia, China - ²Epidemiology Unit, Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, Thailand - ³Inner Mongolia People’s Hospital, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China

Background: Nowadays, COVID-19 disease shot up world-wide which threat the global health, especially healthcare workers and patients in hospitals. The prevention of respiratory infections diseases (RID) is key to hospital-safety management. This study was to use unannounced standardized patients (USPs) to evaluate RID prevention in hospitals. 

Methods: 19 USPs observed both hospital and physicians’ performance in 2 outpatient departments and an emergency department in 10 hospitals within 3 cities: Ordos, Baotou, and Hohhot, of Inner Mongolia. 

Results: The average scores of four items of hospital procedure was lower in Ordos than others. Ordos was the worst in ratings for items of provision of resources for hand hygiene and giving mask on request among the three cities and Hohhot got the highest scores. There existed a linear-quadratic relationship between scores at the hospital level and the physicians’ behavior by GEE model. Jaccard similarity coefficient showed that agreement among observers on hospital level was better than that of the physicians’ behavior with coefficients being 0.74 (SD=0.24) and 0.50 (SD=0.23), respectively. 

Conclusions: The quality of RID prevention was found insufficient in both domains in sample hospitals. The USP method is a useful tool in measuring health and medical care performance at both hospital and personnel levels.