Nigerian undergraduate dental students’ knowledge, perception, and attitude to COVID‐19 and infection control practices

Abstract

Purpose/objectives The current coronavirus disease 19 (COVID‐19) pandemic has affected most countries. Infection, Prevention, and Control training is important in mitigating the spread of COVID‐19. The closure of universities by the Nigerian government has hampered academic activities of dental students. Our objectives were to assess the knowledge, perception, and attitude of undergraduate dental students in Nigeria to the COVID‐19 pandemic and infection control practices. Methods This was a cross‐sectional study of undergraduate clinical dental students from the dental schools in Nigeria. Self‐administered questionnaires were distributed to participants using an online data collection platform. Correct responses to the 45‐item questionnaire on COVID‐19 knowledge were scored to determine their knowledge level. A Likert scale of 1‐5 was used to assess the 13‐item perception and attitude questions. The level of significance was set at P values ≤ 0.05. Results A total of 102 undergraduate clinical dental students participated in the study. Males represented 54.9%, and mean age was 25.3 ± 2.4 years. Fifty percent of the students had adequate knowledge of COVID‐19. Final‐year students (58.1%) demonstrated more adequate knowledge of COVID‐19 than penultimate‐year students (28.6%, P = 0.008). Most (95.1%) respondents had positive attitudes towards infection control practices against COVID‐19. Conclusion Although the clinical dental students had a positive attitude to infection control practices against COVID‐19, the overall knowledge of COVID‐19 was barely adequate. Guidelines on COVID‐19 from reputable health authorities should be reviewed by dental school authorities and disseminated to the students to suit their clinical practice.

Knowledge, attitude, perception, and preventative practices towards COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa: A scoping review

“…The included studies were all conducted in sub-Saharan Africa and published in 2020. Ten of the studies were conducted in Ethiopia [10,12,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], eight in Nigeria [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44], three in Cameroon [45][46][47], two in Uganda [9,48], one each in Rwanda [49], Ghana [50], Democratic Republic of Congo [51], Sudan [52], and Sierra Leone [53], (Fig 2). A total number of 14,353 study participants were reported in the included studies, with over half (51%) of them being males.…”

“…Good preventative practice towards COVID-19 was found in twelve studies [9, 30, 36-38, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52], average in six [10,12,29,39,48,53], and low in other six studies [31-33, 35, 47, 51]. Thirteen of the included studies were from the Eastern African region of SSA, with Ethiopia [10,12,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], Uganda [9,48] and Rwanda [49] accounting for ten, two and one, respectively, whereas West Africa contributed ten studies, with eight being from Nigeria [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44], one from Ghana [50], and one from Sierra Leone [53]. A total of four studies were from the Central Africa, with one and three representing the Democratic Republic of Congo [51], and Cameroon [45][46][47], respectively.…”

“…studies had a high-quality assessment score of 76-100% [9, 10, 12, 29-39, 42, 45, 47, 48, 50, 53] while the remaining eight studies attained an average quality score of 51-75% [40,41,43,44,46,49,51,52]. Of the total 28 studies which were quality assessed, none of the studies attained low quality score below 50% thereby showing a minimal risk of bias in the overall evidence.…”

“…A cross-sectional study conducted in Cameroon revealed that the overall proportion of participants with correct COVID-19 knowledge moved from 9.1% at onset to 41.4% after two months [46]. Most of the participants mentioned that the older population and people with underlying medical conditions were at the highest risk of COVID-19 [12,30,36,44].…”

Systematic Literature Review on Coronavirus Infectious Disease-19 and Dental Masks

“…A study by Umeizudike et al 29) emphasized that wearing face masks, gloves, and face shields during dental procedures could prevent COVID-19 transmission. Wearing a face mask alone reduces the risk of airborne infections in healthy people but provides insufficient protection from airborne viruses 30) .…”