Relationship of musculoskeletal disorder symptoms and percieved workload among hospital workers

Abstract

Objective: This study aims to survey the prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders(MSD) among Korean hospital workers and to analyze the relationship of MSD symptoms and workload perceived by workers. Background: Despite of high exposure to the MSD risk factors and high MSD symptom prevalence among health care workers, there were not enough studies of MSD prevalence among the hospital workers. Method: This study designed a survey based on Nordic questionnaire to obtain MSD symptoms and the degree of four perceived workloads: work repetition, urgency, physical exertion and satisfaction. In this survey, 1,846 workers in a hospital participated. The prevalence of MSD was analyzed for each body part, and MSD cases, which were predetermined in this study, were identified. The relationship between the MSD cases and each perceived workload was analyzed using chi-square test. Results: The pain in the shoulder was the most prevalent among the workers as 52%, and the low back(37%) and leg discomfort(36%) followed. The MSD cases, in which degree of pain was more than severe, were also the most prevalent in the shoulder(13%). Female workers had higher rate of MSD cases than the males. Among the four workload variables, the physical exertion was the statistically related to MSD cases for all the body parts. In addition, the others also had significant relation to MSD cases except one or two body parts. Conclusion: This study found that Korean hospital workers had MSD symptoms mainly in the shoulder, low back and legs in order, and the perceived workload surveyed in this study was highly correlated with MSD symptoms. Application: This study provides another evidence that subjective physical exertion perceived by workers is an important factor to explain MSD cases as same as the objective one.