Vol. 11, Special Issue 7 (2022)

Author(s):
G Vijayakumar, P Reeja George, RS Jiji, R Senthilkumar, M Mini and VL Gleeja

Abstract:
Veterinarians are playing a crucial role in disseminating knowledge to the farmers regarding appropriate antimicrobial use, effects of inappropriate antimicrobial use and development of antimicrobial resistance. The veterinarian requires in-depth understanding about antimicrobial resistance and stewardship practices while making the prescribing decision and this knowledge is the basis for right choice of antimicrobials. Due to the dearth of a suitable test for measuring the knowledge of veterinarians about antimicrobial resistance and stewardship, it was necessary to construct a test for the purpose. Therefore, an attempt has made to develop a test for measuring the knowledge of veterinarians about antimicrobial resistance and stewardship. Pertinent 52 items were collected covering all aspects of antimicrobial resistance and antimicrobial stewardship. After getting the jury opinion on the items, forty five items were selected and administered to 100 veterinarians in non-sample area for item analysis. Finally, those items that had a difficulty index ranging from 0.25 to 0.75, discrimination index above 0.45 and point bi-serial correlation value that was significant at 5 per cent level of significance were selected for the final knowledge test. Thus 20 knowledge items were included in the final format of the knowledge test. The reliability of the knowledge test was measured by the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of reliability. Cronbach’s alpha was found to be very high (α =0.939) and indicates strong internal consistency among the items. To administer the knowledge test a respondent is given one mark for each correct answer and zero mark for each wrong answer.