Nursing students' knowledge and practices of standard precautions: A Jordanian web-based survey

• Educator must frequently assess students' infection control knowledge and practices.
• Infection control knowledge and practices gap needs to be considered by the educator.
• Nursing informatics concepts need to be introduced early to students.
• Creative methods should be used to overcome low response rate in web-based survey.

SummaryBackgroundThe main purpose of this web-based survey was to evaluate Jordanian nursing students' knowledge and practice of standard precautions.MethodsA cross-sectional, descriptive design was used. Six public and four private Jordanian universities were invited to participate in the study. Approximately, seventeen hundred nursing students in the participating universities were invited via the students' portal on the university electronic system. For schools without an electronic system, students received invitations sent to their personal commercial email.ResultsThe final sample size was 594 students; 65.3% were female with mean age of 21.2 years (SD = 2.6). The majority of the sample was 3rd year students (42.8%) who had no previous experience working as nurses (66.8%). The mean total knowledge score was 13.8 (SD = 3.3) out of 18. On average, 79.9% of the knowledge questions were answered correctly. The mean total practice score was 67.4 (SD = 9.9) out of 80. There was no significant statistical relationship between students' total knowledge and total practice scores (r = 0.09, p = 0.032).ConclusionJordanian nursing educators are challenged to introduce different teaching modalities to effectively translate theoretical infection control knowledge into safe practices.