Assessment of Knowledge and Practice Towards Disaster Preparedness and Its Associated Factors Among Frontline Health Care Providers Working in the Emergency Department of Selected Government Hospitals of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2025
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Date
2025-06-01
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Background: Health professional’s disaster preparedness is a key factor to minimize the effects of disaster and to save resources as well as human lives. Therefore, the level of knowledge and practice of health professionals should be determined frequently in order to equip professionals with the basics of disaster preparedness.
Objective: The aim of the present study was to assess knowledge and practice towards disaster preparedness and its associated factors among frontline health care providers working in the Emergency Department of selected government hospitals of Addis Ababa, 2025.
Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted to assess the knowledge and practice of frontline health care providers towards disaster preparedness at randomly selected public Hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from April 1to 30, 2025.Data were collected by pretested self-administered questionnaire using kobo tool box, and statistical package for social sciences version 27 software was utilized to analyze the collected data. Descriptive statistics, chi-square test, binary logistic regression and multivariate logistic regression were utilized to identify factors associated with knowledge and practice of frontline health care providers towards disaster preparedness. Furthermore, P value <0.05 was taken statistically significant for the statistical outputs.
Result: A total of 170 health professionals were included in this study. Seventy-nine (46.5%) of them were males and 65 (38.2%) of them were under the age group of 25-29 with the mean age of 31+4 SD. Eighty-six (50.6%) of them had good knowledge and 51 (30%) of them have good practice. Drills, working hospitals and level of education were the variables that showed significant association with the good knowledge of participants while having disaster preparedness plan, being a member of disaster committee and educational level were the variables that showed significant association with good practice at p value<0.05.
Conclusion: The study showed that over half of participants had good knowledge of disaster preparedness while only one third of them had good practice, showing a significant gap between knowledge and practice levels, also varying levels of knowledge and practice among professions.
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Addis Ababa, Disaster Preparedness, health care providers, knowledge, practice