International Journal of Medical Science and Public Health | 2016 | Vol 5 | Issue 08 1596 Access this article online Website: http://www.ijmsph.com Quick Response Code: DOI: 10.5455/ijmsph.2016.26112015264 Research Article Practice and its determinants of universal precaution among nursing staff in a tertiary hospital of Manipur Susmita Chaudhuri 1 , Omkar Prasad Baidya 2 , T Gambhir Singh 3 1 Department of Community Medicine, ESI-PGIMSR and ESIC Medical College, Joka, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. 2 Department of Physiology, I-Care Institute of Medical Sciences, Haldia, West Bengal, India. 3 Department of Community Medicine, Regional Institute of Medical Sciences, Imphal, Manipur, India. Correspondence to: Susmita Chaudhuri, E-mail: schaudhuri1986@gmail.com Received November 26, 2015. Accepted December 2, 2015 Background: Health workers are at higher risk of infection with blood-borne viruses including human immunodeficiency virus, hepatitis B virus, and hepatitis C virus. Successful implementation of universal precaution can effectively control these infections in health-care setting. Objective: To assess the practice of universal precautions among nurses and factors influencing its use in a tertiary-health center of Manipur. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among the nursing staffs in a tertiary health-care center of Manipur from October 2011 to September 2013. Respondents were purposively selected, and data were collected using structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics such as percentage was used to describe the findings. Result: Total respondents were 446 nurses. Response rate was 98%. Only 24% of the nurses always used gloves whenever contact with blood and body fluid was likely. Five in 100 nurses never washed hands after removing gloves. One-third of the nurses never used gown, 22% of the nurses never used mask, 69.3% never used goggles when blood and body fluid splash was likely. Seven in 10 of the respondents always recapped needles immediately after use. Majority of the respondents used sharp and liquid proof container as a method of disposal of sharp materials after removing needle (61.2%). But, three in 100 nurses mixed sharps with general waste, and around 2% of them threw sharps in open pail. Reasons behind not practicing universal precaution were work stress (10.3%), time constraint (28%), lack of supply of personal protective equipment (67%), lack of display of guidelines (2.5%), and emergency situations (4%). Conclusion: Practice of universal precaution was not satisfactory. Training of the health-care workers, proper equipment supply, posters displaying guidelines, and proper hospital policy of patient load management would significantly help both quantitatively and qualitatively for effective implementation of universal precaution in this premier health-care institution of Manipur. KEY WORDS: practice, determinants, universal precaution, personal protective equipment, health-care worker Abstract International Journal of Medical Science and Public Health Online 2016. © 2016 Susmita Chaudhuri. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. Introduction Health workers are at higher risk of infection with blood- borne viruses including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), and hepatitis C virus (HCV). [1] The WHO estimation shows that about 2.5% of HIV cases and 40% of HBV and HCV cases among health-care workers (HCWs) globally are because of working exposure to blood-borne pathogens. Globally, two million hepatitis B, 900,000 hepatitis C,