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Knowledge of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) by medical personnel in a rural area of Thailand

Part of: SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2020

Patthamaporn Apaijitt  and
Viroj Wiwanitkit
Patthamaporn Apaijitt*
Affiliation:
Nangron Hospital, Buriram, Thailand
Viroj Wiwanitkit
Affiliation:
Dr DY Patil University, Pune, India Hainan Medical University, Haikou, China
*
Author for correspondence: Dr Patthamaporn Apaijitt, E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Type
Letter to the Editor
Information
Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology , Volume 41 , Issue 10 , October 2020 , pp. 1243 - 1244
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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© 2020 by The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. All rights reserved.

To the Editor—Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a new respiratory infection that is a global public health problem; as of February 28, 2020, it had already caused disease in >60 countries. After it first appeared in China,Reference Hsia1 Thailand became the second country where COVID-19 occurred.Reference Yasri and Wiwanitkit2 Presently, COVID-19 is under surveillance in Thailand. Even after several attempts to control the disease, both imported cases and local transmissions still occur.Reference Sookaromdee and Wiwanitkit3 Based on the knowledge, attitude, practice (KAP) theory, good knowledge is necessary for successful disease control. Here, we report the results of a questionnaire on knowledge of COVID-19 administered to medical personnel in a rural area of Thailand. The setting is the Nang Rong district, a rural region of Thailand in Buriram Province, ~410 km from Bangkok and adjacent to Cambodia.

Briefly, a 10-question questionnaire (Table 1) was used to test the overall knowledge of 124 medical personnel (42 males and 82 females; average age, 36.7 ± 7.9 years) working in the study area (5 physicians, 81 nurses, 20 nurse assistants, 12 public health workers, and 6 other medical workers). The average total knowledge score was 6.26 ± 1.42. We observed no association between the total knowledge score and sex or age, but there was a significant association between total knowledge score and type of medical personnel. Many medical personnel still have a low level of overall knowledge about COVID-19, despite the emergence of the disease in Thailand and after several public health policies counteracting the outbreak have been implemented. Surprisingly, some physicians have a lower knowledge score than nonphysicians. These data indicate the necessity to improve education about the new disease among medical personnel. Medical personnel also educate the local population regarding disease and precautions, and if medical personnel are not knowledgeable, disease control may not succeed.

Table 1. Study Questionnaire

Acknowledgments

None.

Financial support

No financial support was provided relevant to this article.

Conflicts of interest

All authors report no conflicts of interest relevant to this article.

References

Hsia, W. Emerging new coronavirus infection in Wuhan, China: situation in early 2020. Case Study Case Rep 2020;10(1):8–9.Google Scholar
Yasri, S, Wiwanitkit, V. Editorial: Wuhan coronavirus outbreak and imported case. Adv Trop Med Pub Health Int 2020;11:29.Google Scholar
Sookaromdee, P, Wiwanitkit, V. Imported cases of 2019-novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infections in Thailand: mathematical modelling of the outbreak. Asian Pac J Trop Med 2020;13:139–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Figure 0

Table 1. Study Questionnaire