Awareness and Attitude toward Infection Control among Health Care Workers during Coronavirus Disease-19 Pandemic, Egypt

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 emerges worldwide consideration since their first proving. The knowledge and attitude of all medical personnel play an important role in the effectiveness of infection control policies among medical institutions.

AIM: The study evaluates the knowledge of health care workers (HCWs) about infection control policies at the Egyptian institutions trying to identify the degree of their awareness to deal with such outbreak.

METHODS: A cross-sectional study was implemented in public and private hospitals sectors at Cairo, Egypt, through a structured self-administered questionnaire that was delivered to HCWs in the selected hospitals.

RESULTS: A total of 486 physicians working between university, governmental, teaching, private hospitals, and polyclinics submitted their replies. Of whom, 46.9% practiced internal medicine specialty, 35.4% were pediatricians, and only 17.7% specialized in the family medicine. Regarding the overall level of knowledge about infection control and prevention among HCWs, we found that 87.2% of participants reported presence of infection control program at their institutions and about 79% practiced these policies while only 60.5% received some training. Furthermore, we found that 64.2% of the participant did not know which infections are officially reported. There was some variation in response to causes related to the outbreak as 43.8% referred that to shortage of appropriate personnel protective equipment and only 7.4% assigned the carelessness of HCWs. Moreover, the insufficient resources to fulfill the infection control requirements were assigned as a primary factor to spread of infection (71.4%). The electronic surveillance system was believed the most efficient reporting system of infectious agents by staff (83.1%). The study revealed that there was a statistically significant difference of knowledge of infection control among medical staff according to their specialties (p ≤ 0.05). Moreover, there was a significant trend of orientation about infection control toward the highly certificated individuals (having PhD). Furthermore, there was a potential variance between the groups of higher and lower years of experience regarding in their answers about surveillance system institutions (p ≤ 0.05). In addition, there was variation in responses to questions related to various institutions as a higher percent of awareness of the presence of active infection control policy was found at the governmental and university hospitals (p < 0.05).

CONCLUSION: HCWs had reasonable knowledge about infection control and surveillance during COVID-19 outbreak and we have discovered zones of concern about infection control experience in Egypt which differ between institutions and professions and years of experience.