Abstract
Since the initial phases of the COVID-19 outbreak, international recommendations for disease control have been readily available. However, blind implementation of these recommendations without grassroot-level support could result in public distrust and low adherence. This study evaluated the use of a public health priorities survey to rapidly assess perceptions of local health workers. A cross-sectional study using a web-based survey was conducted among 5,847 health workers and medical students from January to February 2020 to evaluate the level of prioritization of various public health measures. Measures with the highest levels of prioritization were “Early prevention, environmental sanitation, and improvement of population health” and “Mobilization of community participation in disease control,” which were concordant with policies implemented by the Vietnamese government. This study also demonstrated a high level of internal validity among survey items and shared ranking of priorities among all occupational groups. The use of this public health priorities survey was found to be effective in identifying priorities as identified by grassroots health workers to provide real-time feedback to the national government. However, future iterations of this survey should consider limiting the use of each prioritization score to ensure that responses represent the reality of source limitations and consider focusing on medical professionals and community workers due medical students' limited experience with Vietnam's healthcare infrastructure.
Highlights
On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) China detected a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown etiology at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in Hubei province, China [1]
To supplement data-driven disease control measures, this study evaluated the priorities of Vietnamese health workers and medical students regarding public health interventions to prevent severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-2 spread in Vietnam
From January to February 2020, a web-based survey was conducted among 5,847 health workers and medical students in Vietnam to study the perceptions of COVID-19 in the country
Summary
On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) China detected a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown etiology at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in Hubei province, China [1]. On 7 January 2020, the virus called SARS-CoV2 was isolated [1]. On 11 February 2020, the WHO officially named the disease associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection as COVID-19 [2]. Though COVID-19 is associated with lower case-fatality rates, it has proven to be more infectious [3] than both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, which caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 [4] and of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012, respectively [5, 6]. By 7 April 2020, there were 1,279,722 confirmed cases globally, with over 72,600 deaths in 203 countries across the world [8]
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