Assessment of the Psychosocial Work Environment among Health Care Workers and Its Association with Work and Socioeconomic Status

Abstract

Background: The health care sector constitutes one of the largest sources of employment worldwide. Objective: The aim of this study was to describe the psychosocial status of health care workers and its association with different covariates. Methods: Health care workers from different universities, hospitals, clinics, urban and rural health centers took part in this cross-sectional study. The medium version of COPSOQ was used to evaluate the association between COPSOQ and covariates. The multivariate analyses of variance and covariance were employed to determine multivariate and univariate associations between all psychosocial dimensions and covariates. Results: Most COPSOQ scores showed a good internal consistency and reliability, with total Cronbach’s alpha of 0.76. The study population comprised 7,027 health care workers among whom 64% were female. The results indicated that nurses are more exposed to the psychosocial work environment compared to the other groups of workers within the health care settings. Conclusions: Nurses had a significantly higher risk regarding almost all the psychosocial factors. Considering that the main shortage of human resources in our study population belonged to the nursing group, this bad situation is not surprising. Healthcare workers, especially nurses, are facing various psychosocial factors more than other workers are, because all these factors are in the healthcare environment at the same time