Evaluation of Health Education Intervention on Safe Immunization Injection among Health Workers in Ilorin, Nigeria

Background: Vaccination is expected to be a safe medical intervention that will not lead to harm. Part of this expectation arises because vaccines are routinely given to healthy children. However, reports have shown that about one-third of all vaccination injections are unsafe partly due to poor knowledge and skills of health workers on injection safety. Method: At the pre-intervention stage of this study, semi-structured questionnaires were administered to 102 consenting staff and observational checklist was completed for each of the 13 static immunization centres in the study area. In the intervention stage, the subjects were grouped into case group (50 subjects who had health education intervention given) and the control (52 subjects who were not given health education). While at the post-intervention stage, questionnaires and observational checklist similar to what was used at the pre-intervention stage were administered to both the case and the control groups. Results: Most of the subjects 82(80.4%) had poor knowledge of safe immunization injection technique and were not aware of any policy on injection safety. Injection abscess was the main health hazard of unsafe injection reported by majority 71(69.6%) of the subjects while few of them, 10(9.8%), mentioned needle prick as a health hazard. About two-thirds of them 69(67.6%) felt that open burning is the ideal method of disposal of injection waste, while the actual methods of disposal commonly practiced in most health facilities was open burning 49(48%). Post-intervention results showed that subjects in the case group had better knowledge of injection safety than those in the control especially on issues like what constitute safe injection; injection safety policy, handling and disposal of injection waste and these were statistically significant (p 0.05). Also, there was remarkable improvement on injection safety practices in health facilities of the case group than was observed in the control, but these were not statistically significant except in the area of single use of syringe for each patient. Conclusion: Health education in the form of training on basic concept of injection safety for health workers is an effective strategy in promoting safe immunization injection at the health facility level.