One third (33.4%) of the more than 5,000 health professionals who participated in a study by the National School of Public Health (ENSP), related to covid-19, does not comply with the daily self-monitoring requested by the Directorate-General for Health (DGS).

“Carrying out daily self-monitoring should be the rule in terms of both protecting the health of the professional and reducing the likelihood of the risk of contagion, as recommended by the guidance of the Directorate-General for Health since March 21, 2020”, highlighted in a statement Florentino Serranheira, executive coordinator of the study.

The “Occupational Health” questionnaire of the Barómetro Covid-19, from the ENSP of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, with the contribution of 5,180 health professionals and whose results were released today, also shows that 36.6% of the respondents are without a system covid-19 risk management system, that is, the protection and surveillance of your health in your workplaces during the pandemic.

 

Psychosocial area self- monitoring

The researchers stressed that “the risks for health professionals go far beyond the virus”, as, in addition to the risk of contracting covid-19, anxiety, insufficient sleep hours, fatigue and back pain have an influence in health and in the performance of the activity of health professionals.

“When characterizing the professional risk factors to which health professionals are exposed, it is clear that they are not exhausted by the SARS CoV-2 virus, agent of covid-19. Contact with patients (or suspected cases) of covid -19 has repercussions at a psychological level, showing that almost three quarters of respondents have high or very high levels of anxiety in response to the stress situations they experience “, stressed the ENSP team.  Furthermore, according to the survey, almost 15% of respondents have moderate or high levels of depression.

It has been found from the above survey that almost half of health professionals (44.8%) report that they sleep less than six hours a day.  “This fact, associated with the feeling of fatigue, which has worsened for almost 90% of health professionals since the last survey, can have repercussions on their health and professional performance. In fact, almost four out of five health professionals (78.7 %) considers their (physical) fatigue level to be much worse, compared to the previous week “, pointed out Florentino Serranheira.

Then, 44.8% of health professionals reported that they had not practiced physical activity in the last week and only 2% reported exercising every day.  “This may possibly be related to the high number of allusions to the presence of musculoskeletal pain (or discomfort) at the level of the spine that they did not previously have and which may be related, in addition to the demands of the work, for example with overload caused by the PPE [personal protective equipment] they use “, stressed the investigator. One-third of health professionals do not perform daily self-monitoring – barometer