Lower Back Pain as an Occupational Hazard Among Ugandan Health Workers

Abstract

Background: Lower back pain is a public health concern affecting 70–85% of the world's population. There is paucity of published data on the prevalence, disability and risk factors for lower back pain among health workers in Uganda.Objective: To determine the frequency rate (note that is it implicit that frequency is a rate like incidence so including rate seems redundant here. This is bounded by zero and infinity. In contrast, prevalence is bounded by 0 and 1 and is thus a proportion not a rate) of lower back pain and its associated risks amongst health professionals in the Arua District of Uganda.Methods: Cross-sectional descriptive study of 245 consecutive participants conducted during February-April 2020. We stratified risks as individual or work related and analyzed the data using IBM SPSS version 25. Chi-square was used to measure the significance of association between categorical variables at 95% confidence interval, regarding a p ≤ 0.05 as significant.Results: The mean age of participants was 40.87 years ± 8.74 (SD), with female predominance (69.8%). Majority were either general nurses or midwives (64.9%) and more than half had practiced for over 6–10 years. The frequency rate of lower back pain was 39.6% (n = 97). Individual factors associated with LBP were; cigarette smoking (X2 = 33.040; P ≤ 0.001), alcohol consumption (X2 = 13.581; P ≤ 0.001), age (X2 = 14.717; P = 0.002), and female gender (X2 = 4.802; P = 0.028). The work related factors significantly associated with lower back pain were: being a nurse/midwife (X2 = 9.829; P = 0.007), working in the outpatient department (X2 = 49.752; P ≤ 0.001), bending (X2 = 43.912; P ≤ 0.001), lifting (X2 = 33.279; P < 0.001), over standing (X2 = 40.096; P ≤ 0.001), being in awkward positions (X2 = 15.607; P= < 0.001), and pushing patients (X2 = 21.999; P ≤ 0.001).Conclusion: The frequency rate of low back pain was high amongst health workers and its main associated individual and work related factors could have been prevented. Health workers should strike a balance between caring for their personal back-health and meeting clients' needs while manually handling patients. Ergonomic structuring, job organization, back health care courses and use of assistive equipment could reduce such occupational hazards in our low resourced settings.

Work Related Musculoskeletal Disorders Among Staff at Selected Laboratories in Kampala

“…This could be due to the fact that these studies all had a higher sample size than the current study and used diverse populations from both private and public hospital laboratories. The prevalence (39.6%) established in a cross sectional descriptive study conducted among 245 health care workers at Arua general hospital (15) was within the con dence interval of the current study.…”

“…Working in the same position for long can cause muscular fatigue and low back pain due to stretching and compressing of the tendons and nerves (24). Data from various studies among different occupational groups indicated a signi cant association between awkward postures, repetitious tasks, over standing with MSDs both separately and in combination ( 27) and (15).…”

Low back pain prevention behaviors and beliefs among the Polish population in a cross-sectional survey

“…The time taken for completion of the survey ranged from 1 to 15 min (median time 2 min). One-fifth of respondents (10 individuals) claimed that by completing The sample size for the current cross-sectional study was calculated to be representative based on previous studies (24)(25)(26) and our pilot study carried out on a group of 50 participants. In the pilot study, the Kish-Leslie formula (25) was used to determine the sample size sufficient for validating the findings.…”

Review of the Current Situation of Postoperative Pain and Causes of Inadequate Pain Management in Africa

“…6 Lack of training in pain management resulted in doctors and nurses evaluating patients too late following surgery and providing insufficient pain management. 64 The International Association for the Study of Pain, which includes members representing >200 countries, has determined the necessity for healthcare professionals to increase their knowledge of postoperative pain management. Therefore, rearranging the priority of resource allocation and conducting pertinent organizational seminars regularly is important in a clinical setting with heavily constrained resources in order to ensure that medical workers are up to date with the current trends.…”