4.3.2. Fear of Contacting Patients
TB is a major occupational hazard for Health care workers (HCWs) worldwide. The transmission of drug-sensitive and drug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis occurs through infected droplets aerosolized by patients with active pulmonary TB. The transmission risk to HCWs is highest when patients have unrecognized TB or are receiving inappropriate treatment. However, many other factors influence the risk of transmission and progression to active disease, including healthcare setting, occupational category, individual susceptibility/immune status, and the adequacy of TB infection control measures.
Nurse (N3) said that: “Most of the patients who are admitted in our wards are being transferred from other wards due to their critical conditions. When some wards such as medical wards realize that TB patients’ condition has deteriorated, they transfer them to our wards, and by then you will find that they cannot do anything on their own. They need us to feed them, bath them and take them to the toilet.”
Nurse (N4) said: “Myself, I feel like I am putting myself in danger to be honest. I am scared to come into contact with those patients because most of them are rude and dangerous.”
The findings of this study show that nurses were scared to come into contact with TB patients. As a result, they tend to spend less time with them. Nurses tend to neglect patients because of fear of getting infected and they provide less nursing care to those patients. According to the study done by Valjee and van Dyk [2], healthcare workers express a sense of physical and mental exhaustion and stress from dealing with HIV/AIDS patients that need serious attention and care. The findings of this study concur with those of a study by Wyzgowski et al. [24] which showed that HIV/AIDS patients often tried to expose the nurses and their relatives to their blood and fluids on purpose.