Iran Occupational Health

Background and aims: The operating room is a critical place for accident. One of the events that is likely to occur at this location is fire accident during the surgery. Despite of this truth that such accident rarely happen, but they can lead to serious injury or death of patients. Therefore the purpose of this study is the assessment of awareness and practice of operating room personnel about prevention of fire and effective factors in operating room in Khuzestan hospitals.

  Methods: This Cross-sectional study was conducted among operating room in Khuzestan hospitals in 2013. In this study, all operating rooms personnel were investigated, in random sampling. Questionnaires were used to collect information and knowledge and practice of operating room personnel about preventing of fire, the relationship between these two factors with the age, work experience and the effect of training, education, sex and job title was considered. To examine the relationship between variants, the SPSS16 was used and compare the groups the Mann–Whitney was used.

Results: The Result show that in aware, 15% were high aware, 25% were medium aware, 48/4% were poor aware and 11/1% were unaware, also in operation, 87/2% were high operating, 14/2% were medium operating, 6/7% were poor operating and 8% were very poor. There was no relation between the age and work experience with awareness and operation in Kendal's correlation test (P>0.05). the comparison test in this study show that training is effective on operation and awareness (p<0.05), but there isn’t any significant different between awareness and operation of man and women. Also there was a significant difference in comparison of average scores of awareness between education levels (technician and bachelor) (P<0/05), but there isn’t any significant differences between the kind of jobs (P>0/05). This study show that the level of operation of operation room personnel is more than anesthesia personnel and the differences is significant (p<0.05).

 Conclusion: the results from this study and previous ones indicate that awareness about fire prevention ways between operating room personnel is low and their safety in not satisfied. To increase the awareness about fire prevention ways is operating room, It is suggested to execute safety courses for different levels, aware the personnel about the potential dangers and create a suitable and effective reporting system for happenings.