Healthy behaviours, treatment, and control status of diagnosed hypertension and diabetes among the government nurses and para-health professionals of Bangladesh: A cross-sectional study

Chronic illness among health professionals (HPs) is rarely reported due to idealistic views of their role in treating and fighting diseases. This creates a gap mainly due to a lack of research on them, resulting in insufficient data at the national level, especially in Bangladesh. In this circumstance, we analyzed the data of senior staff nurses (SSNs) and para-health professionals (PHPs) to assess their healthy bahaviours, treatment, and control status of hypertension (HTN) and diabetes mellitus (DM). It was a cross-sectional study that used the census as a sampling technique. The study site was a medical university in Bangladesh located in the capital city of Dhaka. A total of 1942 government-employed health professionals working at Upazila Health Complexes participated and completed both the questionnaire and physical measurements with a response rate of 100%. Among them, 1912 (SSNs = 938 and PHPs = 974) remained for analysis after data cleaning. The prevalence of self-screening (HTN, 97.4%; DM, 81.5%), diagnosis (HTN, 20.5%; DM,15.3%), treatment (HTN, 88.7%; DM, 83.7%) and control status (HTN, 63.7%; DM, 31%) did not reveal any notable differences between SSNs and PHPs. Most of the HPs with HTN and DM failed to maintain adequate physical activity (87.4%; 86.2%), fruit and/or vegetable intake (60.7%; 59%), and healthy body weight (60.5%; 54%) respectively. Only avoidance of smoking showed a significant association with the professional categories in both hypertensives (AOR, 7.98; p = 0.001) and diabetics (AOR, 14.78; p