The risk perception of COVID-19 and practice of precautionary measures amongst healthcare workers in the National Health Insurance Scheme Clinic of a tertiary hospital in Nigeria.

INTRODUCTION

the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the causative virus for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was identified following the report of a cluster of cases of viral (atypical) pneumonia in Wuhan City of China. Healthcare workers are at high risk of contracting the infection from COVID-19 patients and also spreading it unknowingly to their families, especially if they do not take adequate precautionary measures. This study assessed the risk perception of COVID-19 and practice of precautionary measures against its spread amongst healthcare workers practicing in the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) Clinic of a tertiary hospital in Nigeria.

METHODS

this was a descriptive cross-sectional study conducted amongst healthcare workers in the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) Clinic of a tertiary hospital in Nigeria. It employed the use of a pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire to obtain data from the participants. Data analysis was done using the IBM SPSS statistics version 22.0 (Chicago, IL, USA) statistical software.

RESULTS

there were 49 study participants with all of them aware of COVID-19. Only 11(22.4%) respondents reported receiving training on infection prevention and control against COVID-19. Most of them received training from their workplace/hospital (12.2%), while 10.2% were trained via webinars. More of the respondents had moderate risk perception (n=17, 34.7%) while a majority of them had good practice of precautionary measures against COVID-19 (n=28, 57.1%). most of the study participants had moderate risk perception and good practice of precautionary measures. Risk perception was not a significant predictor of practice of precautionary measures.