What Are the Infection Prevention Behaviors of Kidney Transplant Recipients and the Factors Related to These?

All behaviours were self-reported, so the percentages may reflect what patients said rather than what they did. A Hawthorne effect was possible: patients may have given answers they thought were expected. The infection prevention questionnaire was developed by the researchers and had no established validity or reliability for this purpose. The study was single-centre and only included kidney transplant recipients, so results cannot be generalised to other transplant recipients. The cross-sectional design means associations with age, marital status or self-management cannot show cause. Patients who were illiterate, had a psychiatric diagnosis, had multiple organ transplants, were inpatients or had an active infection were excluded, so the sample may not represent all transplant patients. Posttransplant infection status could not be evaluated because data were incomplete and time since transplant was long.

Do not conclude that higher self-management causes better infection prevention. The study measured self-reported behaviours once and found associations, so it does not show that education or self-management training changes patient behaviour.