Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) towards control and preventive measures of hypertension among primary healthcare physicians in Jeddah City, Saudi Arabia, 2022

Background: Hypertension remains a huge challenge globally and in Saudi Arabia in particular. Almost all patients with hypertension in Saudi Arabia are followed up at primary health care (PHC) centers. Therefore, we assessed the knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) towards control and preventive measures of hypertension among PHC physicians.Methods: This was a cross-sectional study carried out using an online questionnaire on PHC physicians from April 2022 to December 2022. We performed descriptive statistics and the Student t-test, ANOVA and Chi-Square test were used to compare and determine associations among variables, with p<0.05 for significance.Results: Our study received responses from 214 physicians, mostly female (55.1%), and aged 25 - 35 years (74.8%). The mean KAP scores were 15.74 +/- 2.39, ranging from 6.0-19.0, 47.14 +/- 5.12, ranging from 33-57 and 32.39 +/- 5.93, ranging from 8-40, respectively. Knowledge positively correlated with attitude (R=0.551) (p<0.001) and practice (R=0.369) (p<0.001), and attitude correlated with practice (R=0.241) (p<0.001). Female gender, family medicine degree and older age were positively correlated with all KAP scores (p<0.05). Family medicine studies (p<0.001), > 2 years of experience (p=0.004) and managing > 30 patients (and p=0.022), and attending hypertension courses (p=0.004) positively correlated with attitude, practice, and knowledge, respectively.Conclusion: This study showed that PHC physicians had good knowledge, attitude and practice towards control and preventive measures of hypertension. However, updating and adjusting courses on hypertension and post-course follow-up to ensure the practice of acquired knowledge are recommended.