An exploratory study to assess the knowledge and attitude of student nurses towards Covid-19 in college of nursing, Christian medical college and Hospital, Ludhiana, Punjab

On 31 December 2019, WHO was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan City, China. A novel coronavirus was identified as the cause by Chinese authorities on 7 January 2020 and was temporarily named “2019-nCoV”. The official names COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 were issued by the WHO on 11 February 2020. All caregivers, including all student nurses, actively participated in the strengthening of care teams. The present study was conducted with the purpose to assess the knowledge and attitude of student nurses regarding COVID-19 with objectives: to assess the level of knowledge and attitude of student nurses related to COVID-19, to find out the correlation between knowledge and attitude , to find out the relationship of knowledge and attitude of student nurses regarding COVID-19 with selected variables like age, gender, training course, year of study, residential area, source of information, exposure with COVID-19 patient and Is any family member or neighbor had COVID-19. A Knowledge Assessment Tool and Attitude Assessment Scale on COVID-19 were developed and used. The pilot study was conducted to ensure the reliability of the tool and feasibility of the study. Data was collected from 230 student nurses of College of Nursing, Christian Medical College, Ludhiana, Punjab, by using non-probability, purposive sampling technique. Maximum number of student nurses 71.30% had good level of knowledge & only 0.87% student nurses have below average level of knowledge and 90.87% student nurses has positive attitude regarding COVID-19. The coefficient of correlation between knowledge & attitude score was 0.119 which shows weak positive correlation. Age, Gender and Training Course had significant impact on knowledge score and only one variable i.e., Is any family member or neighbor had COVID-19, had significant impact on attitude score of student nurses.