Prevalence of neck/shoulder pain among public hospital workers in China and its associated factors: a cross-sectional study

Abstract

Studies have reported that neck and/or shoulder pain (nSp) was prevalent and a non-ignorable occupational health problem in healthcare providers. Considering data deficiency on NSP, we aimed to investigate the prevalence and sick leave absence of NSP among public hospital workers in Shandong, china and to explore the associated factors for chronic nSp. A self-administered questionnaire including the Dutch Musculoskeletal Questionnaire and Modified Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire was filled in by 30,520 hospital workers in 37 hospitals selected randomly from among all public hospitals of Shandong, China. The 12-month prevalence of NSP lasting for at least 3 months and sick leave absence due to NSP among 29,547 public hospital workers was 15.6% and 11.4%, respectively, most frequently reported in tertiary hospital workers (27.4% and 18.9%) and clinicians (19.1% and 15.2%). Log-binomial regression analysis revealed that chronic NSP was significantly associated with hospital level, employment position, contract/temporary employment status (vs. permanent), workload (long work hours per week), ergonomic factors (bending the neck forward for long periods of time, twisting the neck for long periods of time) and computer-related factors (prolonged computer-using time daily, the keyboard too close to the edge of the desk). During the past decades, musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) have become common and an unfavorable occupational health problem among healthcare providers 1-4. Studies have shown that MSDs not only could burden society with great costs but also could lead to decreased productivity, illness, disability and other problems 5-8. A systematic review and meta-analysis 6 of including 13 cohort studies revealed that subjects with musculoskeletal disorders of neck or back region had a 17% increase on the rate of developing a chronic disease such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes compared to subjects without (hazard ratio 1.17, 95% confidence interval 1.13-1.22). Neck and/or shoulder pain (NSP), one of MSDs, has also been reported prevalent in healthcare providers and been studied among some occupations in developed and some developing countries. The prevalence of neck pain or discomfort was reported to be 12% among 5269 Taiwanese nurses 2 to 51.9% among 181 New Zealand nurses 9 and shoulders pain or discomfort 17% among 5269 Taiwanese nurses 2 to 48.6% among 347 Iranian hospital nurses 10. In mainland China, considering the large number of the Chinese population and population aging, more and more medical services are needed. Due to the trust in public hospitals established and policy support for many years, most people would rather go to public hospitals rather than private hospitals when seeking medical service 11. From January to November in 2019, the number of visits among all the 11,891 public hospitals and 22,081 private hospitals in mainland China was 2889.5 million and 515.3 million, respectively, and the number of discharged patients was 153.1 million and 31.7 million, respectively 11. But ...

Prevalence of Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders: Psychological and Physical Risk Factors

“…Nurses working for more than seven hours per day for continuous six days (>42 h) were less likely (lower odds) to have lower back and shoulder pain as compared to those who worked for six days at seven hours per day (42 h) in the current study, which is consistent with the result of Koohpayehzadeh et al [37] for shoulder pain in 512 nursing personnel in the Iran Medical University of Medical Sciences in Tehran and the findings of [38] regarding low back pain. In contrast with our study results, other studies found that there was no significant association between working hours and MSD pain [3,39,40].…”

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