Lanyard Cards and Mobile Phones: Vectors for Transmission of Infection at New Najran General Hospital, Saudi Arabia? A cross-Sectional Observation Study with Epidemiological Analysis

Abstract

Background: Nosocomial infections represent one of the challenging problems of the modern medicine. Healthcare providers play an important role in the transmission of these infections. We aimed to determine the extent of colonization of identity (ID) tags worn around the necks of healthcare workers, and mobile phones and to describe the organisms isolated from them.

Subjects and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 69 hospital staff volunteers. Data were collected on job location, description base and the age of the lanyard and the time. The sample were collected from Staff who were wearing fabric or metal-bead ID card lanyards in a range of intensive care unit (ICU), wards and non-clinical areas.

Results: On basis of the working place, nurses showed higher tag-cleaning frequency, followed by doctors (37.5%, 20.7%, respectively), while technicians never cleaned their tags. Doctors showed higher frequency of hand hygiene/day followed by nurses (6.07 ± 2.4, 5.81 ± 2.3 respectively). Tag swab results revealed higher growth of Coagulase-negative staphylococci among doctors (51.7%) and Alpha-hemolytic streptococci were detected only among nurses (6.3%). Mobile swab results revealed higher growth of Coagulase-negative staphylococci among doctors and technicians (58.6%, 50% respectively).

Conclusions: ID tags and mobiles are potential sources of pathogen spread so many efforts should be taken to make staff awareness toward the potential danger in every institution.