Knowledge, Attitude, and Practices Regarding COVID-19 Among Chronic Illness Patients at Outpatient Departments in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Background: The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a major threat to human life around the world. This study aims to assess the knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding COVID-19 among people with chronic diseases at the outpatient departments in Ho Chi Minh City.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out between February and March 2020 using a convenience sampling strategy in three hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) via the use of a structured self-administered questionnaire. Factors relating to practices, prevalence ratio (PR), and 95% confidence interval were estimated by using the Poisson regression with robust options. P-value <0.05 was considered as statistically different.

Results: A total of 522 participants had a mean age of 51.5 ± 10.6 years. Most of them reported seeing information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic (93.7%) via television and social media (72.8% and 62.1%, respectively). Just over two-thirds of the participants (68.4%) answered with sufficient knowledge of COVID-19. Most respondents had a positive attitude toward COVID-19 (90.8%), although some misconceptions existed. Almost over three-fourths of them (77.2%) maintained good practices for prevention. The rate of good practices in those who had sufficient knowledge was 1.24 times greater than that among those who had insufficient knowledge (PR 1.24, 95% CI: 1.10-1.41, P<0.05). Also, the rate of good practices in males was lower than that of females (PR: 0.91, 95% CI: 0.83-0.99, P<0.05).

Conclusion: There still exists an amount of insufficient knowledge and negative attitude regarding COVID-19, which may be barriers to good prevention practices among chronic illness patients. Education programs need to continue via television and social media and emphasize that people with chronic diseases are more likely to experience severe symptoms, including death from COVID-19. Additionally, management authorities should prolong specific policies to protect the more vulnerable in our community.