The risk perception of COVID-19 and practice of precautionary measures amongst healthcare workers in the National Health Insurance Scheme Clinic of a tertiary hospital in Nigeria

INTRODUCTION: the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the causative virus for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was identified following the report of a cluster of cases of viral (atypical) pneumonia in Wuhan City of China. Healthcare workers are at high risk of contracting the infection from COVID-19 patients and also spreading it unknowingly to their families, especially if they do not take adequate precautionary measures. This study assessed the risk perception of COVID-19 and practice of precautionary measures against its spread amongst healthcare workers practicing in the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) Clinic of a tertiary hospital in Nigeria. METHODS: this was a descriptive cross-sectional study conducted amongst healthcare workers in the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) Clinic of a tertiary hospital in Nigeria. It employed the use of a pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire to obtain data from the participants. Data analysis was done using the IBM SPSS statistics version 22.0 (Chicago, IL, USA) statistical software. RESULTS: there were 49 study participants with all of them aware of COVID-19. Only 11(22.4%) respondents reported receiving training on infection prevention and control against COVID-19. Most of them received training from their workplace/hospital (12.2%), while 10.2% were trained via webinars. More of the respondents had moderate risk perception (n=17, 34.7%) while a majority of them had good practice of precautionary measures against COVID-19 (n=28, 57.1%). Conclusion: most of the study participants had moderate risk perception and good practice of precautionary measures. Risk perception was not a significant predictor of practice of precautionary measures.