Assessment of health care staff's knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards novel coronavirus at Al-Shamiya primary health care centers

Background: Wuhan, China, was the epicenter of an unknown pneumonia epidemic in December 2019. The WHO determined that SARS-CoV-2 caused the outbreak in China and other countries. On February 22, 2020, Iraq, particularly Najaf, had its first case of COVID-19 infection. Infected people might produce fever, dry cough, breathing problems, and myalgia. Objective: assessment of healthcare staff's kap towards novel coronavirus at Al-Shamiya primary healthcare centers in Iraq. Methodology: A descriptive study design was used. 300 non-probability samples from primary health care staff in Shamiya from April 1, 2022, to June 1, 2022, were included in the study. To collect the study data a subjective questionnaire consisting of 4 parts was used: The first section contains the demographic information, the second section covers the healthcare staff's knowledge of COVID-19, the third section contains the healthcare staff's attitudes toward COVID-19, and the fourth section evaluates the healthcare staff's practices while dealing with COVID-19. In order to reach the results, we used descriptive statistics, percentages, frequencies, ANOVA, and correlation. Result: The majority of participants were females 57.3% and 67.7% youths, most of them were from health and nursing professions 89.7%, while the educational level was a diploma 51.3%. The vast majority use official health websites for information and the level of knowledge, attitudes, and practices of the participants were good. Conclusion: There were no statistically significant differences between gender, age, number of years of experience, and the participants' knowledge, While it was found between jobs, educational level, and the participants' knowledge. However, we did not find these differences in attitudes. There were statistically significant differences between gender, age, and the participants' practices. There is a positive correlation between knowledge and attitudes and between attitudes and practices.