Worker’s quality of life and ergonomic conditions in a public health laboratory

Abstract

Objective: To assess quality of life, presence of pain and ergonomic conditions among professionals in a public health laboratory. Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study assessed 49 (90.7%) public health laboratory professionals between July 2014 and September 2015 using sociodemographic data and the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36), the Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA), and the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) for pain assessment. The descriptive analyses of the clinical and sociodemographic variables and the analyses of associations between the data were performed on EPI Info 7.2 using a significant threshold of p<0.05. Ergolândia 6.0 software analyzed the Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) result/score. Results: There was a predominance of women (93.1%), married individuals (57.1%), individuals with a mean of 15 years of study, individuals with an income above 3 wages (61.2 %), and the mean age was 42.7 (SD 13.4). The participants who exhibited poor mental health-related quality of life were at a higher ergonomic risk assessed by the RULA (p<0.05). None of the participants presented an acceptable working posture. All the participants (100%) reported some degree of pain. Moderate and severe pain were negatively related to quality of life in the following SF-36 domains: “general health status”, “pain”, “vitality” and “mental health” (p<0.05). Conclusion: All the participants reported some pain regardless of age and job. Self-reported physical health and the VAS scores revealed that moderate and severe pain negatively influenced quality of life, and, according to the RULA, none of the participants presented an acceptable working posture.