Wellbeing and Occupational Risk Perception among Health Care Workers
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Occupational Safety and Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 18251
Special Issue Editor
2. Laboratoire de Psychologie des Pays de la Loire LPPL-EA 4638, Department of Psychology, University of Nantes, F 44000 Nantes, France
Interests: occupational and environmental health; dermatology toxicology; musculoskeletal disorders; chronic low back pain; well-being; stress
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The current context of our society is alarming, with many factors of imbalance since the end of the twentieth century: 7 billion inhabitants in the world, an aging population, inequality of wealth/migration, global warming, a globalized world with digital transformation, robotization, networking, intelligence artificial, big data algorythms on one hand and in the other aggravation of poverty lines and growth in unemployment, growth in absenteeism within companies, and recently the COVID-19 pandemic which is undermining our health care systems.
The notion of suffering at work has been academically and scientifically debated internationally since the 1970s. Models for analyzing stress at work, or “psychosocial models”, found their rise with R Karasek’s Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ) and J. Siegrist’s effort/reward imbalance (ERI) model. This is part of a quantitative, observational approach to work stress in companies. Links with cardiovascular diseases and depression have been confirmed by numerous international studies first evaluating the industrial sector. Then, those models were focused on health care systems and health care workers (HCWs).
More recently, H.K.S. Laschinger et al. developed an original model aimed at investigating the effect of “action research” or “intervention research” on the “empowerment” within health care services and hospitals in Canada. The aim was to use a quantitative approach to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at liberating the decision-making power of caregivers and supervisors.
Other approaches have been developed since 1980 in France based on qualitative approaches, focus groups related to a psychodynamic analysis of the work (“La psychodynamique du travail”, created by C. Dejours, and Y. Clot) and the use of a qualitative approach to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at freeing the decision-making power of caregivers and supervisors.
These important approaches have unfortunately resulted in fewer international publications, probably due to the smaller number of subjects included, the complexity of the analysis of verbatims, and the statistical rendering.
Today our health care system is under severe strain, and public authorities are faced with drastic choices: saving national economies and maintaining national/international trade, while keeping the health care system running, despite significant deficits.
In this context, the wellbeing, psychosocial risks, and stress perception experienced by medical and paramedical HCWs/teams are increasingly being publicized.
On the biological analysis level, many studies have evaluated the link between stress and biological markers, using mainly salivary, blood, and urinary cortisol as markers; other biomarkers have been used without demonstrating their relevance to date (e.g., CRP and other biomarkers of inflammation such as IL1, 6, ITF gamma, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)), but they could be also influenced by depression/burn out as likely confounding factors. Further studies are necessary and would be welcome.
Scientific studies and publications are therefore essential in this call for publications launched by a high-level international journal: the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Indeed, transversal/observational cohort studies could be accepted, as well as case–control studies analyzing the impact of the work environment on HCWs, as well as new human biological and/or genetic biomarkers of stress at work.
Dr. Dominique Tripodi
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- psychological stress
- health care workers
- well-being
- stress perception
- psychosocial risk
- empowerment
- quality of life
- depression
- burn out
- biomarkers
- cortisol
- interleukin
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