Myths and misconception of COVID-19 among hospital sanitary workers in Pakistan: Efficacy of a training program intervention

Abstract

Objective Hospital sanitary workers are among the prime source to disseminate information at a massive level, however they received least attention during the pandemic COVID-19. The study was designed to investigate the prevailing myths and misconceptions of the coronavirus pandemic among the sanitary workers of health care system. Further, a systematic training program is devised and tested to demystify the false myths with discerning truth and awareness-raising in hospital sanitary workers. Method A pre-post face-to-face intervention design was opted and the intervention was conducted at five locations by the project team. The intervention consisted a 3 days training program to target myths and misconceptions of hospital sanitary workers. The study was completed in 8 months starting from August, 2019 to March, 2020. Participants were recruited from local hospitals having a specialized indoor COVID treatment facility. The sample consisted of 82 participants (n = 25, 30.09% females) with age ranging from 18 to 60 years (M ± SD = 37.41 ± 10.09). Findings The results indicated that 86.4% of the participants never heard the name of the coronavirus before the pandemic in Pakistan. A majority of the participants (> 50%) believed on a very alarming but unrealistic rate of mortality i.e., 30–60%. The pre-testing showed a high prevalence of myths in all four domains (i.e., popular treatments = 24.44, conspiracy myths = 7.93, home remedies = 16.46, and COVID-reliance = 7.82). The pre and post comparison of individual myths showed significant improvement on 24 of the 26 myths with a decline ranging from 0.18 to 1.63. Overall, the intervention significantly decreased scores on all four domains of coronavirus myths. Conclusion The training intervention appeared to effectively reduce myths and misconceptions of sanitary staff workers and is advised to be included as a standard training program for sanitary workers of health care system.

Learning interventions and training methods in health emergencies: A scoping review

“…Most of the articles were descriptive studies on experiences in different countries [ 13 – 177 ], followed by before-after studies [ 170 , 174 , 178 – 261 ]. Also, we found 19 randomized controlled trials [ 262 – 280 ], 14 cross-sectional studies [ 281 – 294 ], 12 observational studies [ 295 – 306 ], 7 reviews [ 307 – 313 ], 5 qualitative studies [ 314 – 318 ] and 3 opinion pieces [ 319 – 321 ].…”

“…For knowledge evaluation, 101 studies [ 18 , 19 , 34 , 42 , 43 , 49 , 66 , 80 , 91 , 95 , 96 , 98 , 100 , 101 , 104 , 108 , 110 , 112 , 117 , 156 , 164 , 169 , 170 , 173 , 176 , 178 – 181 , 183 , 186 – 188 , 190 , 195 – 199 , 201 , 203 , 206 – 208 , 212 , 213 , 215 , 217 , 218 , 220 , 222 , 224 – 229 , 231 – 236 , 238 , 240 , 244 – 246 , 249 , 250 , 253 , …”

The COVID-19 Pandemic Exposes and Exacerbates Inequalities for Vulnerable Groups: A Systematic Review

“…Although there is a vast amount of evidencebased literature available on the risks and safety of healthcare workers, the majority of studies have focused on the medical personnel, specifically doctors and nurses (Sahu et al, 2020;Spoorthy, Pratapa, & Mahant, 2020). Historically, there has been insufficient consideration given to the safety of sanitation workers, who are also vulnerable to getting the virus due to their handling of infected waste (Malik, Musharraf, Safdar, & Iqbal, 2022).…”