Hastane Öncesi Acil Sağlık Hizmetleri Çalışanlarının COVID-19 Pandemisi Döneminde Çalışma Koşulları ile İş Stresi Düzeyleri

Abstract

The data of this descriptive study, in which the working conditions and work stress levels of prehospital emergency health sercives workers were examined during the COVID-19 pandemic period, were obtained by online data collection method in October-November 2021. 372 participants were included in the study, their sociodemographic characteristics, working conditions, working environment conditions were evaluated with the questions created by the researcher within the framework of the literature, and their job stress levels were evaluated with the Turkish version of Swedish Demand Control Support Questionnaire. 53.5% of the participants were women with the average age of 32.57. 71,0% of the participants consisted of emergency medical technicians and 76.1% of the study group have been working in pre-hospital emergency health services for five years or more. About three quarters of the participants work in an emergency health service station. During the pandemic period, the average daily working time was about twenty hours. 28.2% of the employees stated that they did not receive any in-service training, 58.1% stated that they were exposed to violence at least once during the pre-pandemic and pandemic period. The most common type of violence was verbal violence, and the most perpetrators were the patient/patient’s relatives. During the pandemic period, the anxiety of pre-hospital emergency health service workers about having work accident/occupational disease, responsibilities related to working life and family life, shift-night working hours, and the number of daily cases have increased. According to the binary logistic regression analysis models, working with insufficient number of team members is 1.88 times (CI: 1.09-3.27), disagreeing with managers 2.16 times (CI: 1.17-3.99), having communication problems with patients/contacts 2.39 times (CI: 1.36-4.20), providing poor quality food 1.86 times (CI: 1.07-3.23) increases work stress. More studies should be conducted on the current and potential problems of pre-hospital emergency health service workers in Türkiye, and the opinions of relevant institutions, organizations and professional organizations should be sought in the administrative and legislative arrangements to be made.