preprint
An institutional cross-sectional study across eight Ethiopian teaching and referral hospitals evaluated healthcare workers' knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding COVID-19 and its prevention. Out of 422 selected staff, 397 completed structured questionnaires. The findings revealed that 88.2 percent of participants demonstrated good knowledge, while 94.7 percent held a positive attitude towards managing the outbreak. Despite these high levels of awareness, implementation of preventive practices remained comparatively low among the respondents. Access to public information channels, including telecommunications, social media, television, and radio, was significantly associated with higher clinical knowledge. Conversely, workers with a history of chronic medical illness were significantly less likely to demonstrate good knowledge and were more prone to having a negative attitude towards the disease, highlighting the need for targeted capacity-building strategies.
Frontline hospital personnel require robust protection to prevent health systems from being compromised during major viral outbreaks. Although widespread awareness is essential, a discrepancy between knowledge and everyday practice can increase transmission risks within clinical settings. Pinpointing where health workers get their information and identifying vulnerable staff groups enables hospital administrators and health ministries to design more effective, practice-oriented training programmes.
The abstract does not indicate an application pathway.
AI-generated from the published abstract. Always read the original work before citing.
<title>Abstract</title> <bold>Background:</bold> An emerging respiratory disease was abbreviated as COVID 19, after it has been first reported in December 2019 in Wuhan city of China. The virus is zoonotic which has a tendency to be transmitted between animal to human and human to human. The major route of transmission of COVID-19 is droplet and close contact. Ethiopian ministry of health has initiated training for health care workers at a different level. WHO and CDC also initiated a multidisciplinary approach to tackle COVID-19 of which awareness creation is the main. Thus, the main objective of this study is to assess knowledge, attitude, and practices of health workers in Ethiopia towards COVID-19 and its prevention techniques.<bold>Method</bold>: an institutional-based multicenter cross-sectional study was conducted in each of eight teaching and referral hospitals. A total of 422 Ethiopian healthcare workers were selected for the assessment of knowledge, attitude, and practice towards COVID-19. Socio-demographic characteristics and data related to the KAP of the participants were collected using a structured questionnaire Logistic regression model was used to identify factors associated with the attitude and knowledge of healthcare workers towards COVID-19 at a significance level of p<0.05.<bold>Result</bold>: Three hundred ninety-seven healthcare workers participated in the study with a response rate of 94%. Among these, 88.2% and 94.7% of respondents had good knowledge and positive attitude respectively. A respondent with history of chronic medical illness (OR: 0.193, 95% CI: 0.063-0.593), social media, telecommunication, and television/radio as a source of information were significantly associated with knowledge (OR: 3.4, 95% CI: 1.5-7.4, OR: 4.3, 95% CI: 1.3-14.3 and OR: 3.2, 95% CI: 1.4-7.2). Additionally respondent with history of chronic medical illness was significantly associated with negative attitude towards COVID-19.<bold>Conclusion: </bold>The overall level of knowledge and attitude was good. However, the practice was relatively low. Source of information like social media, telecommunication, and television/radio were positively associated with healthcare workers' knowledge about COVID-19. Strategies for enhancing the capacity of healthcare workers to develop practice are needed.<bold>Keyword: </bold>COVID-19, Knowledge, Attitude, Practice, Healthcare worker, Ethiopia
This page summarises published work. The authoritative version sits with the publisher.
DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-29437/v1
Is something wrong with this record? Report it or request removal.
Discussion
Have you built on this work, tried to replicate it, or seen it applied in practice? Share what you know. Verified researchers and MARATTO™ domain experts can open a discussion, and any member can reply. Contributions are reviewed before they appear.
No discussion yet. Open the first thread.
New to MARATTO™? Create a free account.
