English

Abstract

Background: With a high magnitude of hepatitis C in the country and theburden still rising it was imperative to assess the knowledge of HCV infected individuals, whichwould determine the further spread of the disease or otherwise based on the adoption of goodpractices by these patients. Objectives: To evaluate the knowledge and practice regardingHCV in Hepatitis C patients presenting at Ghurki Trust Teaching Hospital, Lahore and toformulate recommendations based on study results to improve knowledge about hepatitisC. Study Design: Descriptive cross-sectional study. Setting: Ghurki Trust Teaching Hospital(GTTH), Lahore. Period: January to May 2015. Methods: The patients of hepatitis C registeredat GTTH for treatment were included in the study after obtaining voluntary informed consentfrom the respondents and approval of the study from the institutional ethical review board. Theconvenience non-probability sampling technique was used to recruit 169 study participants.A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect information, which was recordedand analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences version 21.0. Data is describedin the form of frequencies and percentages for categorical variables and mean and standarddeviation for continuous variable. Results: Of the 169 HCV patients, 110(65%) had heard ofhepatitis C before acquiring it, the popular source of information regarding HCV was identifiedas relatives by 67(39.8%) of the patients. 70(41.4%) of the respondents were aware of a virusbeing the cause of hepatitis C, 140(82.8%) knew that HCV can be spread through sharinginjecting equipment, nearly half the respondents 87(51.5%) had asked their family membersto get tested for HCV and 68(40.2%) patients practiced safe sex. Conclusion: Majority of therespondents had heard of HCV before acquiring the disease. A large proportion of patients wereaware of the disease being spread through sharing injecting equipment. Half of the patients hadtheir family members tested for HCV. But less than half practiced safe sex.