Level of Health Care providers' Knowledge and Attitude toward caring for patients with Hepatitis C [1389]

health care providers are among those groups with greatest risk of blood born infections as Hepatitis C. This affects their practice toward patients with this type of infection. We conducted this survey to study health care providers' knowledge and attitude toward patients with hepatitis C in Razi Hospital in Rasht to increase our knowledge about this issue as well as to improve professional health level and health care service toward these patients. 239 health care professionals of Razi hospital in Rasht [the central of Guilan province] entered an analytical cross-sectional study. Inclusion criteria were working in Razi hospital as doctors, nurses and operation room technicians. Questionnaires consisted of questions on demographic characteristics, knowledge and attitude toward hepatitis C documented by a pilot study and validated by Cronbach's alpha [alpha= 0.7] which were distributed among participants. Data were collected and analyzed by SPSS 16 software. P=0.05 was considered significant. The mean knowledge score was 17.43 +/- 2.65 [from the total of 22], 51.9% of participants achieved upper scores while 48.1% got scores than this limit lower. There was a significant relationship between knowledge score and age, sex, occupation and Level of education of study group. Also there was a significant relationship between attitude level and age, sex, working and educational Background of population under study. Physicians were significantly more knowledgeable and showed more positive attitudes than the other occupational groups. There was a positive correlation between knowledge scores and attitude scores that means better knowledge correlates with better attitude. Present data show that discriminatory attitude is common among health care providers toward hepatitis C patients. Increasing health care providers' knowledge toward this disease is necessary to provide optimal health services for hepatitis C patients