Knowledge and practice on safe handling of cytotoxic drugs among health care workers at Kenyatta National Hospital.

Abstract

Background: Cytotoxic drugs are carcinogenic, mutagenic and teratogenic. Improper handling and use of these drugs leads to occupational health hazards among workers in cancer management settings. No study has been published to evaluate knowledge and practice on safe handling of cytotoxic drugs among workers in Kenyatta National Hospital. Study Objective: The objective of this study was to assess knowledge, practice and challenges on safe handling of cytotoxic drugs among health care workers at KNH. Methodology: A cross-sectional study design using a self-administered structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 109 workers at Kenyatta National Hospital units handling cytotoxic drugs. Stratified random sampling was employed to categorize the workers and simple random sampling to select the study participants, respectively. Data were collected on workers knowledge, practice and challenges. Analysis was done using Stata version 13.0 and Fisher‟s exact test used to compare the relationship between practice, knowledge and other characteristics. The level of significance was determined at p <0.05 Results: Overall, there was female predominance at 73 (66.97%). There were 18 (16.51%) medical officer registrars, 4 (3.67%) pharmacists, 70 (64.22%) nurses, 6 (5.5%) pharmaceutical technologists, 2 (1.83%) supply chain officers and 9 (8.26%) cleaners. Although only 38.53% of the study participants were trained on safe handling of cytotoxic drugs, 104 (95.41 %) had adequate knowledge. However, only 54 (49.54%) scored “good” on practice with 37 (33.94%) scoring “fair” and 18 (16.51%) scoring “poor” on practice. High workload and unavailability of personal protective equipment (PPE) were the main challenges reported. Conclusion: There is a big know-do-gap as workers in cytotoxic units have sufficient knowledge on safe handling but they do not practice it. The main challenges affecting healthcare workers in KNH were high workload and unavailability of PPE.