Knowledge, Attitude and Practice on prevention of COVID- 19 among nursing students in UniKL Royal College of Medicine Perak

ABSTRACT

Introduction: COVID-19 infection is a serious global public health problem and prevention activities are ultimately important to combat this infection. It is more important for the Health Care Workers (HCW) to know and follow the preventive measures effectively as they are front liners in attending the infective patients. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) towards prevention on COVID-19 among nursing students in UniKL RCMP which can be an indicator of KAP level of health care worker and the community. Material(s) and Method(s) A cross-sectional study was conducted among Diploma course student nurses in January to February 2022 using online questionnaire on KAP towards prevention of COVID- 19. Descriptive statistics were used for elaborating demographic characteristics and the KAP levels. Knowledge, attitude and practice of the participants were assessed using a scoring system and categorized to level of KAP. Kruskal Wallis tests were performed as the data were not normally distributed, to determine significant differences among various group year of study with KAP scores while correlation test was used to identify relationship between knowledge with attitude and practice. The significant level is set as < 0.05. All analyses were performed using SPSS version 25. Result(s) and Conclusion(s) Two hundred and fifty questionnaires were distributed and 210 were returned which response rate was 84.0%. Median scores of knowledge, attitude and practice were 18.0 +/- 1.9, 8.0 +/- 1.7 and 7.0 +/- 1.25 respectively. There are significant association between year of study with knowledge (p=0.024) with attitude (p=0.002). However, there is no significant association between year of study practice (p=0.179). Significant positive linear correlations between knowledge-attitude (r=0.466, p<0.01) and knowledge-practice (r=0.575, p<0.01) were observed. Level of Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of nursing students on prevention of COVID-19 in this study were good. There were also positive linear correlations confirms that better knowledge can lead to positive attitude and subsequently in good practices. This is expected finding among healthcare workers as they are future health care workers. Therefore, continuous teaching and emphasize should be provided to ensure the KAP level are good among the nursing students.