Evaluation of Knowledge Attitude and Practices of Medical Undergraduate Students Towards COVID Vaccination

Achievement of herd immunity by vaccination has been seen to be an important step towards eliminating COVID-19 pandemic. Even with the successful Covid vaccination drive launched in many countries there still are doubts regarding the safety of vaccination. This has led to hesitancy among the public towards vaccination. The health care personnel if convinced can motivate many others for vaccination. Thus the present study was planned to assess the knowledge regarding vaccination amongst medical undergraduates and correlate this with their attitude and practices.

790 medical students were approached to fill an online survey, which covered the preliminary demographics, and 20, 4 and 4 questions each on knowledge, attitude and practice regarding COVID-19 vaccine. The responses were evaluated using computer software SPSS version 21.

The mean age of the respondents in our survey was 20.143±1.473 years. Almost 93.45% of the study participants showed interest in taking the vaccine; 78.1% had already received the first dose of the vaccine. The participants depended heavily on social media for obtaining information regarding COVID-19 and its vaccine. Knowledge, attitude and practice were significantly better in cases where the participants or their family members had contracted COVID-19. The participants having attended a series of lecture at the institutional level were significantly more knowledgeable and had better attitude and practices.

The knowledge regarding indication and preventive measures was optimal in our study group. There is significant scope of improvement in vaccination rates among medical students and the acquaintances of medical students. Orientation and reinforcement in the form of lectures, advertisement and any such media would be useful to improve awareness and practices of general public.