Introduction:

Health personnel are more likely to get infected by Mycobacterium tuberculosis because of the increased exposure to patients with the disease.

Objectives:

To evaluate the level of knowledge about the measures of control and prevention of tuberculosis in nursing staff and the possible factors that could influence.

Methods:

Mixed design with triangulation of data, using quantitative and qualitative techniques. A self-administered semi-structured questionnaire was applied to 64 nurses from Pedro Kourí Institute during 2017. Knowledge was graded good, acceptable and poor. Grade ratios were calculated by category. Univariate analysis was performed to look for possible association of the level of knowledge with the covariates (sex, age, professional level, service, years of work experience, years of work in the institute, history of care for patients with tuberculosis and training). For qualitative outputs, observations were processed using the content analysis technique.

Results:

Knowledge in general was graded poor in 75.4% and nobody was graded as good. The best grade was on sample collection (86.2%). The rest were mostly acceptable or poor. Prevention methods had the greatest deficiencies. 56.9% perceived being at risk. The category of nursing technician was associated with poor results of the assessment of tuberculosis knowledge.

Conclusions:

Knowledge about tuberculosis infection control measures were considered poor. The perception of risk varies according to the assessment of existing control measures. Poor knowledge was fundamentally associated with the category of technician

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