Knowledge regarding post-exposure prophylaxis amongst nurses in an African context

Occupational exposure to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among nurses had been reported to be a major challenge in South African and broader African context. There seems to be an increase in the level of exposure and uptake of post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) in Africa. This had warranted the need to establish a systematic review on the level of knowledge among nurses regarding PEP in the African continent. The search engines used included: EBSco Host (North-West University [NWU] library), Sabinet, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, and PubMed. The search was limited to the current decade (2008-2018), including articles that are in English. Keywords used were: ‘knowledge’, ‘post-exposure prophylaxis/PEP’, ‘HIV’, and ‘nurs*’. Thematic evaluation to pick out commonalities of the applications covered in this review have been achieved. The themes identified from the review were: poor knowledge regarding PEP, receiving training on PEP for HIV, immediate steps to take after exposure to infected blood, exposure to HIV, and not taking PEP. There is a strong need to increase the awareness and knowledge regarding PEP as well as to implement training programs to train nurses on the process of PEP in healthcare settings, to increase knowledge on PEP, and thereby decrease seroconversion of HIV. y.