Knowledge of Healthcare Workers Regarding Road Traffic Child Safety in South Bačka District, Serbia
, , , , , , , and | Mar 20, 2024
Article Category: Original scientific article
Published Online: Mar 20, 2024
Page range: 89 - 99
Received: Sep 22, 2023
Accepted: Feb 19, 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/sjph-2024-0013
Keywords
© 2024 Smiljana Rajčević et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
Introduction
Healthcare workers (HCW) can have an important role in educating parents about child road safety, but research on the topic shows that they usually do not have adequate knowledge. Thus, the aim of our study was to analyze their knowledge in the field of child road safety.
Methods
The cross-sectional study was conducted among HCW from South Bačka district, Serbia, using a specially created questionnaire for assessing knowledge on road traffic injuries in children.
Results
The research involved the participation of 317 healthcare workers (86 physicians and 231 nurses). Healthcare workers from primary healthcare made up almost 70% of all respondents, followed by those from tertiary (21.8%) and secondary (11.3%) level institutions. The average percentage of correct answers on the knowledge test was 74.3% (mean=22.3, SD=4.0). Out of all respondents, HCWs employed in the paediatrics department had a significantly higher percentage of correct answers at 77.7% (mean=23.3, SD=3.4) compared to other health workers at 73% (mean=21.9, SD=4.1) (p=0.002). Association analysis demonstrated that HCW employed at paediatric departments on average scored 1.37 (95% CI: 0.40–2.33, p=0.006) points higher in comparison with other HCW.
Conclusion
This research demonstrated an unsatisfactory level of knowledge on child road safety by HCW, and the variability across different question domains, which underlines the need for continuous educations in order to improve their knowledge. Our results may serve in planning additional public health measures and can provide a reference for future studies.