Background: In Ethiopia, the prevalence of health care associated infection is high. Thus, implementing infection prevention activities has an important role in minimizing those infections. One of the activities of infection prevention is proper decontamination, cleaning and sterilization of medical instruments. In order to improve the quality of this intervention, generating evidences through monitoring and evaluation is indispensible. Therefore the key stakeholders have reached an agreement to conduct this process evaluation.
Objective: To assess the implementation status of decontamination, cleaning and sterilization process of medical instruments in the public health centers of Mekelle zone, Tigray.
Method: Descriptive study design was employed in this evaluation study. The evaluation was conducted in public health centers of Mekelle zone from January, 2017 to June, 2017. For the quantitative part, observation of health care workers’ practice using pre tested questionnaire was conducted. As a complement, key informant interviews were also conducted. Collected quantitative data were checked, coded and entered into SPSS version 20 for analysis. Frequencies, Mean, percentage, tables were used for results presentation and qualitative data were coded, categorized and finally conceptualized/give meaning.
Result: Availability, compliance and safety of health care workers were used to evaluate the implementation of the intervention. Accordingly, availability of resources in the studied health centers has been rated as good ( 74.2%). And compliance level of health care workers has found to be fair ( 66.1% ). However, health care workers had poor practice in separating soiled from clean instruments, immersing of contaminated instruments in 0.5% chlorine solution for the correct duration and using oldest packs first. About practice of safety by the health care workers has found to be poor ( 48% ). In general, the overall implementation status of the service had been judged as fair ( 63.4 ).
Conclusion: According the judgment criteria, the overall implementation