PREVALENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS AMONG OPERATING ROOM PERSONNEL WORKING IN TERTIARY CARE HOSPITALS OF PESHAWAR
Keywords:
Occupational hazards; Operating room personnel; Musculoskeletal disorders; Descriptive cross-sectional study.Abstract
Background: Regularly Operating Room (OR) personnel are exposed to a wide range of occupational hazards, still data describing these hazards in Peshawar, remain very limited. This descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out to address that gap.
Objective: This study aimed to find the prevalence, types, factors related to occupational hazards, and related symptoms and conditions, among OR staff employed in tertiary care hospitals of Peshawar (HMC, LRH).
Methods: 235 OR personnel were selected from Lady Reading Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex, Peshawar by using simple random sampling technique. Structured, validated questionnaire were used for data collection that was adapted from a previous study in Finland and for analysis SPSS version 22.0 were used by running descriptive statistics, the Mann-Whitney U test, the Kruskal-Wallis test, and the Chi-square test.
Results: Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) were the most prevalent health symptoms, with lower back pain affecting 54.5% of participants. Among the Psychological symptoms, highly prevalent were mood swings (65.5%), and almost half of members reported exposure to Hepatitis B (49.8%) and Hepatitis C virus (48.5%). Headache by (69.4%) was the commonest symptom due to chemical exposure. We also analyzed that female staff reported significantly higher exposure to biological, ergonomic, and psychosocial hazards than males (p<0.05), and there was a significant difference to hazard exposure by profession. Awareness of these occupational OR hazards was high (84.3%), but only 52.3% of participants have received formal hazard-related training.
Conclusion: Work related hazards among OR personnel in Peshawar's tertiary care hospitals are highly prevalent and unequally distributed by gender and designation. Formal structured training sessions, biosafety protocols, ergonomic interventions, counseling and psychological support are needed to protect the staff and eventually improve the quality of care they provide.
