Knowledge and Self-Reported Practice of Face Mask Utilization among Outdoor Patients during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Introduction: COVID-19 has been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020.

Objective: To find out the Knowledge and self-reported practice of face mask utilization among outdoor patients during the covid-19 pandemic.

Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional descriptive type of study was undertaken to assess the state of knowledge and self-reported Practice of face mask utilization among the patient attending the out-patient department at Dhaka Medical College and Hospital, from January 2020 to December 2020. A semi-structured questionnaire was developed in English and then translated into Bengali. A total of 224 respondents were interviewed with age range from 18 to 6o years. The participants were selected by using a convenient sampling technique. SPSS 25 version was used for data analysis.

Results: In this study, 33% of respondents belonged to the age group of 18 to 30 years and the majority of respondents (61.20%) were female. It was found that 32.6% of respondents completed a secondary level of education, 29% completed a higher secondary level, whereas 8% has no formal education. The majority (62.10%) of the respondents was from the urban area and 37.90% were from the rural area. According to this study, 63.4% of respondents had good knowledge and only 20.5% of respondents had a good practice in face mask utilization. The mean score of knowledge was found 9.86 out of 12 where the Standard deviation was ±2.35. A statistically highly significant (p<0.05) association was found between the educational level of the respondents and respondents’ knowledge of face mask utilization. Another association was found between the level of knowledge and level of practice on face mask utilization, which was also statistically significant (p<0.05) that is knowledgeable people had opined on practice for better protection from infectious diseases like COVID-19.

Conclusion: In the current study practice of people wasn’t found up to the mark compared with knowledge regarding face masks.

Keywords: Knowledge, Self reported Practice, Face mask, Covid-19.