Work-related disorders among employees of a federal public university in southern Brazil

Abstract

Background: Work-related disorders have considerable impact on the health of workers at a high cost for national budgets. Yet these conditions are globally underreported, less than 8% in Brazil. Shortcomings in health policies and records hinder attempts at establishing the health profile of civil servants in Brazil, who represent 8% of the local workforce. Objective: To establish the profile of federal civil servants with work-related disorders and relate it to diagnoses recorded in Civil Servant Work Accident Reports (CS/WAR) issued at a federal public university in southern Brazil. Methods: We analyzed 166 CS/WAR; 79.52% corresponded to women, average age 46.46 (SD=10.06), ≥21 years in the job (34.9%), workers at the university hospital (64.46%) and medium- or technical level health care workers (45.78%). Mean duration of sick leave spells was 11.89 (SD=21.33) days. About 41.57% of CS/ WAR did not provide an ICD-10 code; 82.5% of the rest corresponded to work accidents, mainly lower extremity injury (31.5%) and 17.50% to occupational diseases, most commonly low back injury and infectious diseases (17.7% each). Conclusion: The results reinforce the need to improve the record system in public service facilities to enable strategies targeting the main health problems exhibited by this population of workers.