Appraisal of Biosafety Measures in Governmental Medical Laboratory Personnel: Knowledge, Attitude, Practice (KAP) Study

Abstract

Laboratory staff is always exposed to a variety of hazards according to their work nature and so, they must be conscious at all times. This study is aimed at the assessment of safety awareness to get knowledge attitude and practice among governmental medical laboratory staff in Khartoum state. A descriptive cross-sectional study performed on 210 Sudanese governmental medical laboratory staff working in 15 governmental hospitals lab. Data was collected by direct interviews using structured, pretested, closed ending questions, coded and designed by researcher questionnaire developed, and validated using universal guidelines data analyzed by using the statistical package of social science (SPSS). The study result shows that there is good awareness in some of the safety awareness domains and weakness in others, the result of the comparison of the laboratory specialist scores mean and laboratory assistant scores mean to show that there is a significant difference between them and also there is no significant difference between mean scores of BSc holder and MSc holder medical laboratory specialist, correlation and association result shows that there is a strong negative correlation between experience and scores in medical laboratory specialist and weak negative correlation between experience and scores in medical laboratory assistant. Relative weakness in medical laboratory safety awareness was revealed, which reinforce health authorities, the administration of medical laboratory, universities, and hospitals must intensify courses and training programs about medical laboratory safety and establish functional and active, and well-implemented occupational safety policy systems that will be supervised by safety officers.