Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices Survey of Tour Operators Regarding Travel-Related Infectious Diseases, Taiwan, 2016

Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices Survey of Tour Operators Regarding Travel-Related Infectious Diseases, Taiwan, 2016

While international travel is growing, the risk of travel-related infectious diseases is also increasing. Tour operators, such as tour guides and tour leaders, who provide the first line service, play an important role in travel health and disease prevention. Previous studies mainly focused on travelers. The objective of this study is to explore the knowledge, attitudes and practices of tourism industry regarding travel-related infectious diseases and its influencing factors to provide reference for future policy-making. We enrolled the participants in a symposium for sharing the achievements in health tourism by the industry in 2016. We collected personal information and relevant knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding travel-related infectious diseases using a self-administered structured questionnaire. We applied descriptive statistics and chi-square tests to analyze the influencing factors. Analysis of 65 valid questionnaires showed that 62% of respondents had sufficient knowledge of infectious diseases, whereas those with correct knowledge of respiratory diseases (65%) were much fewer than those with correct knowledge of intestinal and vector-borne diseases (91%, 97%). More respondents with education level of university or higher had sufficient knowledge compared with those with lower education level (p = 0.04). Overall, 63% of respondents had a positive attitude. Only 33% of the respondents had visited travel health contract hospitals for vaccination, chemoprophylaxis or travel health counseling. Respondents' information of travel epidemics was mainly from Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (66%) and less from travel agencies (35%). We recommend continuously strengthening travel agencies' risk perceptions of travel-related infectious diseases in order to enhance the knowledge and establish a positive attitude among the tourism industry. With assistance from the competent authorities, in-service workshops and training courses should be conducted regularly for tourism industry to reinforce the concept of epidemic prevention. In addition, we recommend promoting travel medicine in multifaceted ways, making tour operators utilize travel health contract hospital services and undertake essential pre- and post-travel health risk assessment.