A pre-designed questionnaire included items about the occupational back- ground of participants (department, job title, lifetime duration of work experi- ence and working hours per day). The questions related to KAP included 17 items. These items were developed by the authors after reviewing similar pub- lished articles. For knowledge, 6 items were included, e.g. on the existence of a waste disposal plan or strategy at the hospital, colour coding for waste dispos- al bags and identification of biohazard symbol. Attitudes were assessed using 6 questions, e.g. about whether they con- sidered proper waste disposal plans a hospital priority, whether waste disposal was a team not a hospital responsibility and whether they would like to join a training programme on waste man- agement or not. Actual practices were assessed by a participant observation checklist (5 items) concerning wearing personal protection, correct disposal of sharps and other waste, hand-washing after injection. Practices was not as- sessed for housekeepers as it contained observations that were not related to their job.
The questionnaire was developed in Arabic using simple local language and was tested in a pilot study with 20 persons of different job titles (physi- cians, nurses and housekeepers) and any required changes were made. The reliability of the questionnaire was as- sessed by applying reliability test using Cronbach alpha (0.73).