ETC 56 - Use of Gamification to Identify Gaps and Educational Opportunities in Infection Prevention Practices in a Large Academic Medical Center

Background: Gaming spotlights and encourages competitiveness in a fun way while actually increasing the knowledge of the health care workers. Due to COVID-19, many infection prevention practices were modified, which created knowledge deficit in healthcare workers related to infection prevention practices. The game is designed to identify the gap in healthcare worker knowledge, provide immediate feedback and education.

Methods: The game was designed as a mobile app and a web-based version to target the hospital nurses with 3 questions being released daily for 8 days and participants were given extra 2 days to complete the game. Submission of each question provided immediate feedback with explanation of the rationale and excerpts from additional resources and where to locate them. There were total of 24 questions that addressed the 11 categories (isolation precautions, antibiotic resistance, blood culture collection, environmental cleaning, catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI), catheter-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI), glove use, infection transmission, pathogens, hand hygiene, and pneumonia) and participant responses were analyzed, using frequency, to identify the knowledge gaps.

Results: A total of 134 hospital nurses participated. The percentage of hospital nurses who correctly answered questions in each category were as follows: isolation precautions (49%), antibiotic resistance (97%), blood culture collection (96%), environmental cleaning (59%), CAUTI (96%), CLABSI (90%), glove use (97%), infection transmission (94%), pathogens (62%), hand hygiene (100%), and pneumonia (89%). The results revealed that the categories with the highest healthcare knowledge gaps were isolation precautions followed by environmental cleaning.

Conclusions: This study found that healthcare worker’s knowledge gaps exist in the areas of isolation precautions and environmental cleaning. We anticipate that providing immediate feedback with educational resources and explanation of rationale to the participants will contribute to an increase in the knowledge of infection prevention practices.