Compliance with personal protective equipment use among non-medical healthcare professionals during Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Non-medical healthcare professionals, including pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, nutritionists, and radiographers, have a high risk of COVID-19 infection during work. Personal protective equipment use has shown effective in preventing virus transmission. This study aimed to investigate the compliance with personal protective equipment use and identify the factors that may influence their compliance.
 The study was designed cross-sectionally, with a self-administered questionnaire. The respondents were non-medical healthcare professionals recruited from covid and non-covid ward at Saiful Anwar General Hospital. The data were collected in November 2020. The questionnaire consists of four questions to assess compliance and eighteen questions to explore the factors that may relate to their compliance. This study used the Chi-square test to differentiate the level of compliance between two groups and binary logistic regression to analyze factors that may influence the compliance.
 Most participants in this study were female (84.8%), with a median age of 33 (23 – 57) years. More than 80 % of participants worked in the non-covid ward. Only one-fifth of participants had work experience of more than 15 years. The compliance with personal protective equipment was 67.3%. In univariate analysis, factors that influenced the compliance were difficulty using, removing, and disposing of personal protective equipment, lack of training and regular monitoring, unsure about the effectiveness of personal protective equipment, uncomfortable in donning personal protective equipment. Co-workers never reminding themselves to use personal protective equipment also influence compliance. In the multivariate analysis, the difficulty of using, removing and disposing of personal protective equipment (OR 2.83 (0.730 – 3.478), p=0.025) significantly influenced compliance with personal protective equipment use.

Protective Behavior and Factor Associated with Inappropriate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Use among Frontline Disease Control Personnel during the Early Phase of Pandemic

“…Surprisingly, among all participants, those who worked for longer periods (more than a year) used less suitable PPE than those with less experience, which is the opposite of our assumption nor the literature that ones with more work dura-literature that ones with more work dura-that ones with more work duration and experience had more protective behaviours and better compliance with PPE than another group [21,23],but correlated with another paper that HCW with more experience abided the protective measures lower than those with less experience [24]. We assume that the participants with more working experience maybe negligent and thought that their methods of using PPE were already appropriate without awareness of the current guideline.…”

Applying the Social Cognitive Theory: Relationship between Knowledge, Organizational-Environmental, and Self-Efficacy to Community Pharmacists Compliance with COVID-19 Health Protocols

“…The environmental-organizational factors in the study reveal the availability of supporting facilities plays an important role in supporting community pharmacists' compliance. In addition, a previous study in Malang Indonesia reported that lack of punishment does not affected to compliance level of pharmacists (24). This finding is in line that one of the factors that influence behaviour at work is enabling factors, one of them is facilities or infrastructure that support the occurrence of behaviour by someone (25).…”

A longitudinal environmental surveillance study for SARS-CoV-2 from the emergency department of a teaching hospital in Hong Kong

“…The lowest compliance item was “wearing N95 respirator” among those who had provided direct care to confirmed COVID-19 patients (85.1%) or performed AGP (79.6%). Previous studies have reported shortages of PPE and lack of training as the major reasons for non-compliance ( [44] , [45] , [46] , [47] , [48] ), and different countries have reported a wide range of compliance rates (32.0-96.5%) ( [44] , [45] , [46] , [47] , [48] , [49] ). Comparatively, the compliance rates found in our study was fairly high.…”