Investigatation of the Awareness, Attitude and Self-Care Behaviors of Employees of Universities of Bushehr in the Corona Pandemic and its Relationship with Anxiety

The Covid-19 crisis in December 2019 as a global pandemic was followed by many disorders such as stress, anxiety and depression among different communities and occupational groups. The high incidence and mortality statistics and the lack of known treatment methods indicate the need to discover the awareness, attitude and performance of the society about Corona. Therefore, the present study was designed to investigate the awareness, attitude and self-care behaviors about Corona disease and its relationship with anxiety in employees of universities of Bushehr in 1400.

The present study is a cross-sectional descriptive analytical study in which 287 employees of selected universities of Bushehr participated. The participants received online the researcher-made questionnaire of awareness, attitude and performance about the disease of Covid-19, Spielberger's overt and covert anxiety questionnaire. Mean, standard deviation, frequency tables and graphs were used to describe the data. For data analysis, univariate regression and hierarchical multivariate regression were performed. In the end, after data collection, data analysis was done through SPSS version 19 software.

The average scores of participants’ knowledge, attitude and self-care against Covid-19 in the study were (28.19±1.88), (13.38±1.30) and (34.26±4.02) accordingly. 68% of the participants in the study had moderate to severe overt anxiety and 88% had moderate to severe hidden anxiety. Attitude had a significant relationship with overt anxiety (P>0.001). Full and relative satisfaction with income was also related to obvious anxiety (P>0.001); However, awareness and self-care had no significant relationship with overt and covert anxiety (p>0.05).

According to the findings of the study, although the knowledge of the participants about the covid-19 disease was lower than the average, but they had a higher than average attitude  and performance self-care and high anxiety. In fact, those participants who had a positive view in the conditions of Covid-19 had a lower level of anxiety. But awareness and self-care were not related to their anxiety. It is suggested that related to the undesirable level of participants’ knowledge and their anxiety in covid 19 conditions, health system administrator should develop health education programs of the country and senior university s with the aim of improving the necessary knowledge about Covid-19 and reducing the anxiety levels of employees. Also, the findings of our study lead to the fact that the positive self-care attitude and performance of the participants in Corona conditions is realized in the shadow of other components apart from having awareness, which is necessary for researchers in this field to explain the role of other factors by conducting other studies. Factors affecting the attitude and performance of self-care in Corona conditions should pay more attention.