Coronavirus Disease-19: Public Health Nurses’ Knowledge, Attitude, Practices, and Perceived Barriers in Indonesia

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 outbreaks and its rapid rise in prevalence has been a major concern internationally. We conducted a short survey to understand the knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding COVID-19 and estimated barriers to disease transmission perceived by public health nurses (PHN) in Indonesia.
 AIM: The study aimed to identify the association of sociodemographic characteristic with knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding COVID-19 among PHNs in Indonesia and highlight barriers to the control of infection perceived by PHNs.
 METHODS: A national, online, and cross-sectional survey was conducted from May 28 to June 9, 2020, with a total of 368 participants. A questionnaire was used to assess knowledge, attitude, and practice. An independent t-test was used to compare attitude differences of PHNs in gender and place of work. One-way analysis of variance was used to compare differences in attitude of PHNs by age, work experience, educational level, and source of information. The Pearson’s correlation test was used to measure the correlation between knowledge, attitude, and practices.
 RESULTS: The majority of participants had good knowledge of COVID-19 (77.4%), had mean scores of attitude toward COVID-19 of 33.0 ± 2.7, and had good practices regarding COVID-19 (84.2%). Factors associated with knowledge were sources of information (p = 0.013). Factors associated with attitude were gender (p = 0.003), work experience (p = 0.010), and sources of information (p = 0.035). Factors associated with practices were gender (p = 0.011) and sources of information (p = 0.029). There were significant, positive linear correlations between knowledge and attitude (r = 0.435, p = 0.000), knowledge and practices (r = 0.314, p = 0.000), and attitude and practices (r = 0.362, p = 0.000). Most participants strongly agreed that limitations on infection control materials (50.8%) and patients hiding their travel history, resulting in screening inaccuracies (59.8%), were barriers.
 CONCLUSIONS: A significant association between sources of information and knowledge, attitude, and practices, with the addition of other related factors. There were also significant positive linear correlations between knowledge, attitude, and practices. Nevertheless, the majority of the PHN perceived that limitations on infection control materials and patients hiding their travel history, resulting in screening inaccuracy, were major barriers.

Knowledge and quality of life among Indonesian students during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Based on the independent T-test result, we can conclude that health students have significantly higher scores of COVID-19 knowledge than social students (p<0.001). This finding is in line with a study conducted by Kistan et al and Sahar et al which stated that health students' knowledge about the prevention of COVID-19 in Indonesia was classified as good [20], [21]. A study was done by Alzoubi et al also reported that health science students had a high knowledge of COVID-19, while social science students had low knowledge [18].…”

Knowledge, Attitude, Practice, Perception, and Psychological Response of Nurses Regarding Covid-19; Literature Review

“…Based on the results of the literature search found 21 articles (Table 1) generally assessed the knowledge, attitudes, practices, perceptions, anxiety, and psychological responses of nurses related to COVID-19. Four articles were found in China (Chen et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2020;Jin & Yi, 2020;Li et al, 2020), two in Arabian (Al-Dossary et al, 2020;Alreshidi, 2020), two in India (Adhikari et al, 2020;Patidar et al, 2020), one in Nepal (Kafle et al, 2020), three in Turkey (Aydin & Balci, 2020;Gumus & Basgun, 2020;Semerci et al,2020), one in Northern Ethiopia (Tadesse et al, 2020), two in Pakistan (Alwani et al, 2020;Zafar et al, 2020), one in Iran (Nemati et al, 2020), one in Lebanon (Saadeh et al,2020), one in Ghana (Buertey et al, 2020), one in Indonesia (Sahar et al, 2020), one in Bangladesh (Saha, et al, 2020), and one in Egypt (Goda Elbqry, 2020). The number of samples between 85-1.323 nurses, using a questionnaire as an instrument, the study used a cross-sectional study.…”

“…Research in Ghana, nurses show that the level of preventive practice has been recorded to be good (Buertey et al, 2020). Research in Indonesia, of 368 PHN nurses, nurses had good practices related to COVID-19, factors related to practice were gender, and resources (Sahar et al, 2020). Research in Bangladesh, 73.42% of nurses have good practice, 21.84% moderate practice, and 8.68% bad practice, there is a significant relationship between knowledge and practice of nurses (Saha et al, 2020).…”

“…Factors related to knowledge are the source of information. There is a significant positive linear correlation between knowledge and attitudes, knowledge and practice, as well as attitudes and practices (Sahar et al, 2020). Research in Bangladesh, as many as 380 nurses, showed that 73.42% of nurses had good knowledge, 17.63% of nurses had knowledge is sufficient and 8.95% have poor knowledge about prevention and control of COVID-19 infection (Saha et al, 2020).…”

“…Research in Indonesia, the majority of nurses has a positive attitude towards COVID-19 with an average score of 33.0 ± 2.7. Factors related to attitudes are gender, work experience, and sources of information (Sahar et al, 2020).…”