Assessment of front-line healthcare workers’ Knowledge, Attitude and Practice after several months of COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Background: Frontline healthcare workers (F-HCWs) are at the forefront of medical care providers against the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic which has life-threatening potentials. Inadequate knowledge and incorrect attitudes among HCWs can directly influence practices and lead to delayed diagnosis, poor infection control practices, and spread of disease. Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) regarding the COVID-19 pandemic among the frontline healthcare workers (F-HCWs) working at a tertiary care hospital situated in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and to identify the factors significantly associated with KAP. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 260 health care providers across eastern Uttar Pradesh including Basti city during December 2020. Data was collected using a self-primed pretested questionnaire from the FHCWs working at a tertiary care hospital of eastern Uttar Pradesh. In this survey, a convenience sampling method was adopted. 12 items on knowledge, 10 items on attitude, and 5 items on practices related to COVID-19. The other variables consisted of 4 items on socio-demographic attributes, P-value and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were performed to assess the attitude and practices in relation to knowledge. Results: Of the total 260 study population, 228 were interviewed online, 32 were self-administered. Knowledge and attitude of the nursing staff were highest but practice score was best for residents. Among different age groups knowledge, attitude and practices scores were highest for 35-45, 45-60 and 25-35 age groups respectively. Respondents having 5-10 years of experience had the best knowledge and the attitude score was highest for HCWs having 10-20 years’ experience but the practice score was higher for HCWs having more than 20 years’ work experience. Overall knowledge score of respondents having strong correlation with attitude (p< 0.05) and to the practice (p<0.05). Conclusion: In this survey many F-HCWs reported adequate overall knowledge with a positive attitude and adopted appropriate practices. The F-HCWs with a higher level of education and more years of experience in health care facilities had better KAP towards COVID-19.

Knowledge, Attitude, And Practice Towards Handling Covid-19 Among Nurses in a teaching hospital

“…Meanwhile, 12.2 % choose neutral impact on others. The finding of this present study is in line with the result of another research conducted in India (Maurya et al, 2020).…”

“…According to Maurya et al (2020), respondents in the nursing profession have the highest level of knowledge compared to other healthcare workers. However, Salman et al (2020) found that 75.5% of respondents had good knowledge of COVID-19, where the doctors were found to have better knowledge scores than the other health professionals.…”

Uttar Pradesh: state governance and response in COVID-19 pandemic

“…Anticipating the spike in cases in near future, the strategy of state government in this direction from beginning was to increase the number of beds like 10,000 beds in level one, 5000 beds in level two, and 2000 beds in level three defined in level of Hospital L1, L2 (with oxygen), and L3 (with ventilator). Various training was imparted to frontline health-care workers and had better overall knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) toward COVID-19 compared to any HCWs specially technicians and students ( Maurya et al., 2021 ).…”

Measuring COVID-19 Related Health Literacy in Healthcare Professionals—Psychometric Evaluation of the HL-COV-HP Instrument

“…While there is a growing body of research on aspects of COVID-19 related health literacy of the general population [4,15,16,22] or specific populations, e.g., migrants, children, students, or patients [8][9][10][11]13,[19][20][21]23], little is known about the COVID-19 related health literacy of healthcare professionals, such as physicians, nurses, or psychologists. Since 2020, many studies have investigated the knowledge, attitude, and behavior of healthcare professionals worldwide [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. The results indicate a lack of adequate knowledge about COVID-19 in many cases (6-42%) [24,25,27,32].…”

“…Healthcare professionals having a higher education were found to have better knowledge about COVID-19 [28,33,35]. Strong significant correlations were found between knowledge, attitude, and behavior [26,34]. However, data on the COVID-19 related health literacy that allow the analysis of healthcare professionals' knowledge, motivation, and ability to find, understand, evaluate, and use the information on COVID-19 is still missing.…”