Open AccessKnowledge and attitude among healthcare workers towards COVID-19: a cross sectional study from Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia
Author(s) -
Talal Qadah
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of infection in developing countries
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.322
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 2036-6590
pISSN - 1972-2680
DOI - 10.3855/jidc.13083
Subject(s) - marital status , health care , cross sectional study , pandemic , covid-19 , positive attitude , family medicine , computer assisted web interviewing , outbreak , medicine , psychology , nursing , disease , environmental health , infectious disease (medical specialty) , population , social psychology , business , pathology , marketing , virology , economics , economic growth
The emergence of the new Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a major impact on global health system. This cross-sectional study was designed to appraise the knowledge and attitude of healthcare workers towards COVID-19 and find out their understanding about clinical aspects of the infection.
Methodology: A total number of 1023 of healthcare workers responded to an online questionnaire and provided their data between February and March, 2020 in Jeddah city, Western province, Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire was distributed to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, technical staff and administrative staff working in clinical settings.
Results: Results revealed that mean scores for knowledge and attitude were 20.793 ± 2.436 and 4.744 ± 0.297 respectively. More than 88% of participants displayed positive knowledge and attitude towards COVID-19. Knowledge data showed that social media and the workplace, were the main sources of information for the majority of respondents. Approximately 99.12% of respondents were aware of the viral pandemic, and the causative agent. Statistically significant association was found when compared the demographic characteristics with the mean knowledge while no statistical signicance was observed when compared demographic characteristics with the mean attitude score except with marital status.
Conclusion: This study showed that healthcare workers had sufficient knowledge and positive attitude towards COVID-19. However, hospital staff should be periodically given sufficient training to effectively cope with such outbreaks in the future.