Knowledge and practices on prevention of COVID-19 among nursing students in the Jaffna district

Abstract

COVID-19 has been started to spread worldwide since December 2019. It was severely affected all countries including Sri Lanka. Nurses play a major role in caring the COVID-19 patients. As future nurses, nursing students are expected to have adequate knowledge and practices in the prevention of COVID-19. The study aimed to assess the knowledge and practices on prevention of Covid-19 among the nursing students in the Jaffna district. It is an institutional based descriptive cross-sectional study carried out among 318 nursing students at the Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, University of Jaffna and the College of Nursing, Jaffna. The data were collected with a self-administered questionnaire in google form and analysed in descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean, median and standard deviation. Bivariate correlation with Pearson product moment correlation was used to the assess correlation between knowledge and practices related to COVID-19 prevention. The mean age of the participants was 24.53 years (SD=1.30). Around three forth of the of participants (75.2 %) were female. Most of the participants (40.3%) reported that they stayed at the hostel for the last three months and the majority of the participants (66.9 %) were reported that they attended to the clinical posting. Overall results of the study indicated that majority of the nursing students were having good knowledge on COVID-19 prevention (84.1 %). There were 72.4 % of participants who had practice score above the median practice score (MPS=6). Majority of the nursing students were having good knowledge and better practices related to COVID-19 prevention. But there was no statistical significant relationship between knowledge and practices related to COVID-19 prevention among nursing students in the Jaffna district (p=0.432, r=0.046).