Abstract
Hand washing is an important preventive measure to avoid transmission of Coronavirus Disease of 2019. Medical students should be acquainted with the World Health Organization's hand-washing guidelines and should follow them to break the chain of spread of the virus. This study aims to find the acquaintance of medical undergraduates with the guidelines and to find out if they have started implementing these guidelines since the corona-virus outbreak. This is a descriptive cross-sectional study, conducted among MBBS, BSc, and PCL nursing students in their first year to the internship of a tertiary care hospital from May 2020 to August 2020, and ethical clearance was received from the Institutional Review Committee (ref no: IRC-LMC 11-D/020) of Lumbini Medical College and Teaching Hospital. Data collection was done through online questionnaires. Data analysis of the obtained information was done in Microsoft-excel. Point estimate at 95% Confidence Interval was calculated along with frequency and proportion for binary data. Of 462 respondents, 265 (57.4%) (52.9-61.9 at 95% Confidence Interval) respondents followed the World Health Organization hand-washing guidelines during every hand wash. Among them 172 (37.2%) participants had learned the guidelines through awareness programs. The majority of respondents belonged to 20-25 age groups, 275 (59.5%), and the majority were pursuing an MBBS degree, 360 (77.9%). We conclude that a notable number of medical undergraduates have been acquainted with standard hand-washing guidelines since the corona-virus outbreak, but some of them still do not follow the guidelines practically. Therefore, effective and impactful awareness programs need to be launched to improve hand hygiene practices.
Highlights
Hand washing is an important preventive measure to avoid transmission of Coronavirus Disease of 2019
This study aims to find the prevalence of medical undergraduates who are acquainted with World Health Organization (WHO) hand-washing guidelines and if they have started implementing these guidelines since the COVID-19 outbreak in a tertiary care center
Of 462 respondents in the survey, a total of 261 (56.5%) respondents had recently been acquainted with the WHO hand-washing guidelines; 172 (37.2%) had learned the guidelines through awareness program in TV or social media, while the remaining 89 (19.2%) had acquired the knowledge about the guidelines through some other sources, which showed that a notable number of participants seem to have acquired knowledge from awareness programs in recent years
Summary
Hand washing is an important preventive measure to avoid transmission of Coronavirus Disease of 2019. Medical students should be acquainted with the World Health Organization’s handwashing guidelines and should follow them to break the chain of spread of the virus. Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2),[1,2,3] identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has spread globally, resulting in an ongoing pandemic.[4] The World Health Organization (WHO) has published advice which includes maintaining a meter distance,[5] wearing a mask, and following hand-washing guidelines entitled, “Hand Hygiene: Why, How and When”.6. Even in Nepal the COVID-19 cases are still on rise, and medical personals are infected.[9,10] the tendency of hand-washing according to WHO guidelines in medical personals should be known but the information regarding this topic is lacking in the.
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