Background: Coronaviruses have been a significant hazard and one of the the most cause of human morbidity in recent years. Lack of knowledge and negative attitude toward COVID-19 and its vaccine among healthcare workers (HCWs) could lead to difficulties in controlling the infection with spread of infection among intra-hospitals Physicians and Nurses.
Objective: To assess attitude, practice and perceived barriers to infection control toward COVID-19 among Physicians and Nurses) HCWs (in Kafr El Dawar Central, Dimisna Pediatric Speciality, and Itay El Barud General hospitals in El-Behera governorate during the period from December2022 and May2023.
Methods: A cross-sectional web-based survey was designed using random sampling method and conducted on 1393 HCWs (doctors and nurses) at three hospitals in El-Behera governorate, Egypt. We used Google form sheet and printed questionnaires to collect answers of HCWs to each of the questionnaire items, then data were tabulated and statistically analyzed.
Results: The study included 39.9% physicians, 60.1% nurses. They reported positive attitudes towards the importance of workplace notification (1309; 94%) and continuous involvement in fighting COVID-19 epidemic within the community (1295; 93%) while they reported negative attitudes towards being more active than usual (168; 12.1%) and feeling tired or less energetic during outbreak (239; 17.2%). They reported good practices regarding covering mouth when cough/sneeze (1333; 95.7%) and hand washing after touching contaminated objects (1300; 93.3%) while they reported poor practices towards staying at home to avoid infection (257; 18.4%) and avoid meeting more than 10 persons (367; 26.3%). Barriers to overcome COVID-19 disease mainly included lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and infection control supplies (905; 65%) and lack of information about the disease (847; 60.8%) while the least reported barriers were lack of workplace operational manual (571; 41%) and lack of training and supervision on operational manual of COVID-19 disease (520; 37.3%). No significant differences (P>0.05) were found between the overall mean attitudes, practices, and barriers scores and different characteristics of most participants.
Conclusions: Physicians and Nurses showed fair (57.4%) to positive (37%) attitude and fair (58%) to good (20.7%) practices towards COVID-19 infection while 26.6% disagreed with barriers. The most cited barriers to overcome the disease were lack of PPE and infection control supplies (65%) and lack of information about the disease (60.8%).