International Journal of Occupational Hygiene
Volume:10 Issue: 1, Mar 2018

related low back pain represents an important occupational health and safety issue worldwide. Realizing the prevalence and factors for work-related low back musculoskeletal disorders among sewing machine operators of garment industry were one of the key issues of improving worker’s health. To assess the prevalence and associated factors of work related low back pain among sewing machine operators of garment industries in Galan City, East Ethiopia. An institutional cross-sectional study was conducted through face-to-face interview among 422 sewing machine operators from two garment industry. Detailed information on socio-demographic conditions, organizational factors, personal factors, working environment and musculoskeletal symptoms obtained in face-to-face interviews. The outcome of interest, low back pain, as a worker experiencing self-reported musculoskeletal symptoms in the lower back were defined by aches, pain, or discomfort during the last 12 months. Both bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis were used to determine the degree of association by using odds ratio with 95% CI. From the total respondents included in the study the prevalence of self-reported low back pain was 64.9%. Employees with longer year of service 2 up to 10 times more likely develop work related low back pain than had shorter year of service. This finding identified socio-demographic, organizational and personal factors as the potential risk factors for work related low back pain in garment industry. Therefore the government and the owner of the company focus on the prevention and control strategy of work related low back pain in the garment industries

Inherently Safer Design (ISD) is served as an important and crucial step for Industrial Safety Management Systems. It is simpler, cheaper, and more efficient to eliminate and/or reduce inherent hazards. However, uncertainty, relativity, ambiguousness and quality/quantity transformations disrupt the implementation of ISD. As advantages of fuzzy reasoning, naming problems can be resolved in order to have a justified and sophisticated decision making about Inherently Safer Design Assessment. Accordingly in this paper, ISD four principles: 1.Elimination/Substitution, 2.Minimization, 3.Moderation and 4.Simplification enter the Fuzzy Mamdani system: Fuzzy ISD Index (FISDI) to accomplish Fuzzy Inherently Safer Design Assessment. Inputs and output of the FISDI range from 0 to 100 and are categorized in 5 triangular membership functions. The proposed FISDI is applied for acetic acid production unit. The unit is divided into 7 zones, the 4 principle based checklist is provided for each zone and the FISDI is computed for each zone, then the total FISDI is computed for the unit. The results show that the minimum, maximum and total FISDIs equal to 29, 72 and 45.1 correspondingly. The total plant FISDI data is compared to the classic ISDI. The cross validation accomplished via CFtool in MatLab presents the mean slope of 0.7181 and mean R2=0.7885 which is a justified curve fitting within the scope of the study philosophy_70% of the ISD. The FISDI mainly underestimates the aggregative ISDI. It is noted that the most conformed and the least conformed zone cross validations are determined as Zone 4 and Zone 7 respectively

Sickness absenteeism is a major problem among organizations and health care units; causing loss of work-hours and reduced productivity in the workplace. Previous studies have shown that several factors are associated with sickness absenteeism including social conditions, workplace and organizational conditions and employees’ characteristics. Other studies have shown that psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety, and musculoskeletal disorders are the main causes of medical absenteeism. The present study is designed to investigate sickness absenteeism in the employees of an auto plant in order to evaluate the occupational health of employees based on the basic indicators of absenteeism.

An institutional-based cross-sectional study was organized to evaluate the intensity of sickness absenteeism and associated factors among auto plant employees in Tehran, Iran in 2016. Stratified sampling and simple random sampling techniques were used to select the study participants. Data was collected from the questionnaire, medical records, and employees’ attendance system. Multivariable analyses were employed to see the effect of explanatory variables on the dependent variable.
Findings: The frequency of medical absenteeism among employees was 11.3%. 26.8% of medical absenteeism was more than 15 days. smoking and workplace group were significantly associated with sickness absenteeism.

Our study found that smoking and working in the trunk 1 department of the auto plant were significant risk factors for sickness absence in employees. In general, absenteeism is a complex and multifactorial phenomenon and should be evaluated in order to recognize the affective factors and control them.

There are several stressors in Health Care Workers. Work-related psychological stress has adverse effects for individual and organization. Neglecting these consequences can impose irreparable damage to the health care organizations.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect and determinants of each aspect of occupational stress on the performance of health care workers.

This descriptive-analytical study was conducted in 2017 By census on 400 health-care workers of one of the public hospitals in Gorgan, Iran. Data was collected using standard questionnaires of occupational stress and job performance and Data were analyzed by SPSS and LISREL software.Results The highest and lowest effect of examined stressful factors on job performance were respectively related to physical environment dimension with a standard coefficient of 0.89 and the role insufficiency dimension with a standard coefficient of 0.43. Also, the relationship power between the overall dimensions of occupational stress and employee performance is estimated to be 0.73, Which is a significant amount. The test statistic is also 5.24, which indicates that the correlation observed is significant.

Accordingly, one of the important interventions can be focusing on the improvement of the physical conditions of the workplace and maintaining noise, humidity, dust, heat and cold at standard levels.

(LBP) due to lumbar disk herniation could collaborate with various risk factors. In this study, we focused on analysis of lumbar disk herniation risk factors in patients with LBP. This comparative cross-sectional study was conducted in Hamedan-western Iran in 2014-2015. Overall, 58 cases with evidence of lumbar disk hernia were classified as a case group and 47 cases without evidence of lumbar disk herniation were classified as a control group. The data collection was performed by using a questionnaire and the statistical analysis was performed by using SPSS software. The analytic results indicated a meaningful correlation between demographic variables as body mass index (BMI) mean, occupation type and lumbar disk hernia (P

Low-frequency noise is annoying even at lower levels and affects cognitive functions of individuals.Some individual differences, such as sensitivity, can reduce or increase the effects of noise on cognitive performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of noise sensitivity on cognitive performance in the presence of low-frequency noise.

In this interventional study, research population was all students who were studding at Hamadan University of Medical Sciences. For this purpose, 120 students were selected through purposive sampling (60 students with high sensitivity and 60 students with low sensitivity). To simulate the real environment of each subject, they were exposed to noise levels of 50, 60 and 70 dB for 40 min. While exposure to the determined noise levels, the cognitive performances of the subjects were examined using the integrative visual-auditory continuous performance test (IVA CPT). Data were analyzed using SPSS 20.0 software, independent t-test and ANOVA tests.

The results showed that the low-frequency noise negatively affected the components of cognitive performance, and it decreased the cognitive performances with increasing the sound pressure level (SPL) from 50 to 70 dB and from 125 to 250 Hz. (P

The results indicated that the components of attention and work quality reduced with increasing SPL, and this negative effect of low-frequency noise was higher in women with high sensitivity

Workers in welfare centers, as compared to other people, have to endure more labor and labor, which may be due to burnout. The present study was conducted to further support this issue with the aim of analyzing the relationship between workload and burnout dimensions among employees in health centers of Gonabad city.

This is a descriptive-analytic study in which 100 employees and nurses of Welfare Organization were selected and their workload and occupational burnout were determined using the NASA-TLX questionnaire and the Maslach-Jackson Inventory. The data were analyzed using spss22 software and using Chi-square tests, correlation and one way ANOVA.

The Welfare Organization employees had the most burnout in perspective of efficiency perspective (67.9±21.3). They had the lowest rate of burnout in the exhaustionand frustration perspectives (37.05±24.23), and they had moderate burnout in the dimensions of mental pressure, physical pressure, time pressure and effort (63.40± 26.17, 58.75±23.78, 60.30±21.72 and 61.54±26.31).

Considering the findings of the research and the importance of the profession of welfare employees, it is important to solve the problems of Welfare Organization employees and authorities must provide the necessary solutions for fitting the environmental, managerial and personnel conditions

This study evaluated the safety attitude and determined its predictor individual and organizational variables among nurses. This cross-sectional and descriptive-analytical study was conducted on 295 nurses working in hospitals affiliated to the Babol University of Medical Sciences, northern Iran (at 6 hospitals) from Oct 2016 to May 2017. The required data was collected using two questionnaires of demographic and organizational information and Safety Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ). The data were analyzed using the SPSS Ver. 23 software. A logistic regression model (Backward: LR) was also used to investigate the effect of predictor personal and organizational factors on the studied nurse's attitude of safety. The highest and lowest scores in the dimensions of the SAQ questionnaire were respectively related to the stress recognition dimension (73.57 ± 17.93) and management perception dimension (48.79 ± 16.17). Based on the Pearson correlation, a significant correlation was established between the six dimensions of the questionnaire except for the stress recognition dimension. In addition, the most important individual-organizational factors affecting the attitude of the studied nurses included gender, training, work experience, education, and type of the ward. Since among the individual-organizational variables affecting the attitude of safety, the nurse's training can be acquired, it is recommended to hold regular safety courses along with an assessment after the training to improve the safety attitudes, and consequently, reduce the occupational accidents for nurses