Awareness and Attitude towards Proper Use of Personal Protective Equipment Against Covid-19 Disease Among Nurses at Federal Teaching Hospital, Ido-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria

Abstract

In the wake of the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of appropriate use of personal protective equipment (PPE) among nurses cannot be over-emphasized in the prevention of the infection. This paper therefore investigated the awareness and attitude towards proper use of personal protective equipment in the prevention of COVID-19 infection among nurses at the federal teaching hospital, Ido-Ekiti. It adopted descriptive research survey to study a sample of 50 nurses consisting of 25 nurses from the surgical wards, 23 from medical wards and 2 from the isolation ward in line with their numerical strengths. A self-developed structured questionnaire tagged Awareness of Proper use of Personal Protective Equipment Questionnaire (PPEQ) was used for the study after being validated by experts and pre-tested for reliability yielding 0.89 index and the instrument was administered by the researcher. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics of percentage, mean, scores and standard deviation, while inferential statistics of Regression analysis was used. The findings of this study showed that the level of awareness and positive attitude towards proper PPE utilization was high and of significant value among nurses working at federal teaching hospital, Ido-Ekiti. It is recommended that nurses, other health workers and patients should be provided with appropriate PPE. Periodic training and re training should be organized for nurses and other health workers on the proper donning and doffing of PPE.