எய்ட்ஸ் & மருத்துவ ஆராய்ச்சி இதழ்

Background: Cases of COVID-19 have been increasing in number and spread globally. Pharmacists are an important part of the health care system and their role is critical in completing the management cycles of Coronavirus outbreak surveillance.

Methods: A multi-centric cross-sectional study was conducted on 84 pharmacy professionals recruited from both community and hospital pharmacies in Jigjiga City to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice towards COVID-19. Self-administered questionnaires were developed and distributed to the participants. All extracted data were cleaned, coded and entered into the Statistical Package for the Social Science software version 20 and subsequently analyzed. Binary logistic regression analysis was used to identify determinants of knowledge, attitude and practice towards COVID-19.

Results: All of the respondents had already heard about COVID-19. More than 90% of the participants had adequate knowledge regarding typical symptoms, etiological causes, modes of transmission, measures to protect the infection, risky patients and primarily affected organ system by COVID-19. The majority of the respondents (71.4%) had adequate knowledge regarding COVID-19. The finding indicated that pharmacists had 8 times higher odds (AOR=8.34 95% CI (1.33-36.04)) of adequate knowledge than the pharmacy technicians. Greater than half of the study participants (53.6%) had a positive attitude towards COVID-19. More than 4 out of 5 participants were confident that Ethiopia can win the battle against the pandemic. Participants with less than five years of experience had 6 times greater odds (AOR=6.16; 95% CI (1.52-24.86)) of a positive attitude than their comparator. A low number of participants (16, 22.6%) exercised adequate practice to prevent and control the novel coronavirus spread.

Conclusion: The community and hospital pharmacists had good knowledge but had a poor attitude and practice towards the COVID-19. The majority of the participants perceived that they can play a great role in this pandemic.