Assessment of awareness and personal protective eyewear usage among workers of small- scale enterprises in jimma city

Abstract

For greater production and productivity, safe work and workplace are required, and so promotion and protection of safe work and workplace are complementary parts of industrial development. Industrial jobs, on the other hand, may produce hazardous labor and working conditions due to intrinsic hazards in their materials, processes, technology, or products. People working at industrial facilities, as well as the general public in the surrounding area and the environment in general, may be at risk of accidents and work-related diseases. Eye injuries do not happen at random. The majority of eye injuries have a clear link to the type of job and activity performed at the time of the accident. Because of their jobs, some people are at a higher risk of getting eye injuries. Small-scale and large-scale industrial workers are among these individuals. With regard to Jimma Medical Center, Department of Ophthalmology, it is not uncommon to see repeated outpatient visits as a result of ocular trauma at workplace which raises the issue of awareness on ocular personal protective equipment usage among workers in small scale enterprises in Jimma city. Objective: The aim of this study is to assess awareness and personal protective eyewear (PPE) usage practice at workplace of workers in small scale enterprises in Jimma city. Method: A cross-sectional community based descriptive study design is conducted from May 2021 to August 2021. A standardized questionnaire was used to collect data from randomly selected small-scale firm workers in Jimma city. The SPSS version 26.0 software package is used to conduct descriptive and logistic regression data analysis. Result and discussion: A total of 214 workers of small-scale enterprises of welding, wood work, and wood and metal work are included in the study with 82(38.32%) from welding SSE, 125(58.41%) from wood work and 07 (3.27%) from metal and wood work SSEs. All of the participants are male with mean age of 27.35 ± 7.22years and mean year of experience of 4.7±4.7 Years. Among the 82 welders, 98% mentioned flying tiny metallic chip foreign body, excessive light and chemical fumes as possible ocular trauma hazards at workplace. 94% of workers in wood work mentioned impact and dust particle foreign bodies as possible workplace hazards. All workers believe that workplace ocular trauma hazards are preventable and mentioned using PPE as a major preventive measure. As a whole 47% of workers claims that they usually use PPE during working time. With regard to type of SSE 96.3% of welders; and only 16.8% of workers in woodwork claims to use PPE. Only 10.7% of the total workers used PPE always during working with the reason of not using always IV being forgetting for 58.9% welders and negligence or thinking they are involved in low-risk activity (60.6%) and not being comfortable for 34% of workers in wood work. The study showed that 86.6% of workers has history of sustaining one or more types of ocular injury and most (88.3%) of workers didn’t wear PPE by the time they sustain ocular injuries at work place. Out of workers that are observed wearing PPE at workplace, only 15.6% of them used the recommended standard. The study showed that using PPE always during working time and using the recommended standard is associated with decreased occurrence of ocular injury at work place (p<0.001)