JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Staff working in residential care homes (RCHs) have played a significant role in preventing the spread of infection among residents, visitors, and staff. Providing continuous professional training to the staff is essential; nonetheless, current infection control training mostly rest on short educational talks or one-to-one reminder in the RCHs. A blended mode (using online interactive games and face-to-face consultations) was now proposed as a new way to conduct infection control training in the RCHs.

Objective:

To assess the efficacy of the Blended Gaming COVID-19 Training System (BGCTS) on infection control practices (ICP) and knowledge of standard precautions among all staff in RCHs.

Methods:

A 2-arm single-blinded cluster randomized controlled trial was designed. Thirty RCHs were recruited and randomized. Due to COVID-19 pandemic and there were infected cases in the homes, 17 RCHs refused or delayed the on-site observations. 212 staff (from 13 RCHs) completed the training and the on-site unobtrusive observations by the research nurse for monitoring post-training practices. The intervention was a blended mode of training (e-health mode blended with face-to-face sessions) and the contents are derived from ‘The COVID-19 Risk Communication Package for Healthcare Facilities developed by the World Health Organization. E-health mode referred to a 120-minute web-based training system covering 8 topics in 2 weeks. Short-clip videos and games were used. Two face-to-face 30-minute interactive sessions were arranged for clarifying concepts.

Results:

The improvement of the use of gloves and personal protective equipment (PPE) was significantly greater in intervention group (IG) than that of control group (CG) (F=43.206, p<0.001). However, there was no significant changes in hand hygiene compliance after the BGCTS training. This may be due to the ceiling effect of the hand hygiene compliance at baseline (IG: 95.8%; CG: 98.6%). The survey indicated that the IG has significantly higher scores in self-reported infection control practices (SICP) than that of CG (β= 2.619, Wald χ2 95% CI [4.291, 9.426]) after using the BGCTS.

Conclusions:

BGCTS improved RCH staff’s performance in ICP, specifically in gloves and PPE use, and their SICP. BGCTS was shown to be an effective training although it lasted two weeks only. The short duration of training using BGCTS is most welcomed by the RCH staff because it does not take up much time from their work. This electronic-based infection control training with two intensive interactive sessions has good potential to be adopted as regular training in RCHs.