Knowledge and protective behaviors of staff nurses towards influenza pandemic at health care setting of Nepal

Abstract

Background: It is crucial to have knowledge and good protective behavior on influenza pandemic among staff nurses. Effective influenza pandemic management requires understanding of the good knowledge of Pandemic influenza’s signs and symptoms, way of transmission and protective measures including proper uses of personal protective equipment. The aim of this study was to compare the knowledge and protective behavior of staff nurses working in health care facilities of Chitwan and Kathmandu district, Nepal. Methods: A cross-sectional quantitative comparative survey was carried out in health care facilities of Kathmandu and Chitwan District, Nepal from February to mid March 2012. Hospitals based nurses’ data was collected using interview method. A total of 424 staff nurses from 5 hospitals of Kathmandu and Chitwan district were involved for this study. By using convenient method 2 districts were selected and hospitals and staff nurses were identified by using simple and systematic random sampling respectively. All data obtained in this study was analyzed by using chi square test for categorical and students T test for continuous data at SPSS 16 Results: 32.10% and 47.20% of staff nurses of Kathmandu and Chitwan exhibited inadequate knowledge while 67.90% and 52.80% of Kathmandu and Chitwan showed adequate level of knowledge about Influenza Pandemic (P = 0.004). It was observed that nurses working area and history of contacting with Influenza pandemic patients were affecting knowledge level scores (p = <0.05). Only 45.99% of respondents were exposed with influenza pandemic patients (73.11% of Kathmandu and 18.86% of Chitwan). Only 16.1% of Kathmandu district and 19.6 % of Chitwan district participants had good protective behavior towards influenza pandemic. The mean knowledge score of the participants of Kathmandu district was 29.22 where as in chitwan it was 27.02. on the other hand the mean protective behavior score of Kathmandu was 20.58 where as in Chitwan it was 21.07. Knowledge and protective behavior were partially positive correlated for Kathmandu district (r=0.106) where as in Chitwan it was partially negative correlated (r= -0.77) Conclusion: From this study we can conclude participants of Kathmandu district had more knowledge score than Chitwan district where as Chitwan district had good protective behavior score than Kathmandu district. Knowledge only may not work during the pandemic outbreak period, the main import things are availability of protective measures.