Preparedness and Responses of Healthcare Providers to Combat the Spread of COVID-19 Among North Shewa Zone Hospitals, Amhara, Ethiopia, 2020.

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an emerging respiratory disease that is caused by a novel coronavirus and was first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The disease is highly infectious, and its main clinical symptoms include fever, dry cough, fatigue, myalgia, and dyspnea. Healthcare providers are in front in fighting the coronavirus spread by making themselves the risk of contracting the disease.

Objective: To assess the preparedness and responses of healthcare providers to combat the spread of COVID-19 among North Shewa Zone Hospitals, Amhara, Ethiopia.

Methods: Facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted from April to May 2020 among 422 healthcare providers in the North Shewa Zone, Amhara, Ethiopia using a self-administered questionnaire. Study subjects were selected through systematic random sampling based on their proportional distribution of sample size to each hospital. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. The data were coded and entered into the Epi data 4.2.1 version and the analysis was carried out in Statistical Package for Social Science 25 versions.

Results: Four hundred four participants involved in the study have been given a response rate of 95.7%. The self-satisfaction of healthcare providers revealed 301 (74.5%) of study participants feel unsafe in their workplace. Two-third, 260 (64.4%), of them responded that they feel anxious while working with febrile patients. Nearly one-third (31%), 27.4%, 15.9%, 14.5%, 14.2% of HCPs had access to gloves, facemask, goggle, shoe, and apron respectively in hospitals.

Conclusion: Protecting healthcare workers is a public health priority. Access to essential personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic was limited. The poor perception of healthcare professionals about not having enough support from medical institutions and public health authorities raises the need to urgently implement strategies to protect healthcare workers in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.