Notification of COVID-19 as an occupational injury by health workers: scoping review

ABSTRACT

Objective: To identify the publications that discussed COVID-19 as an occupational injury and its notification by health workers.Methods: The search for this scoping review explored national and international literature, between 2020 and 2021, in English, Portuguese and Spanish, in the databases of the Regional Portal of the Virtual Health Library, in MEDLINE through PubMed and in Capes Journal Portal used Embase, Scopus, Web of Science, CINAHL. The texts were imported into EndNote, duplicates were removed and exported to the Rayyan application, and the articles were included in an Excel spreadsheet with the labels COVID-19 as injuries at work and Notification of COVID-19.Results: A total of 5665 studies were identified, excluding 2088 duplicates, resulting in 3577 publications, selected by title and . Of these, 3280 did not meet the inclusion criteria, resulting in 297 articles. Of these, 10 were selected for full text analysis because they dealt with COVID-19 as an injury at work and/or notification of this condition by health workers. Two articles were excluded because they were a literature review, remaining 8 as the study's corpus.Conclusion: Although certain countries already recognize COVID-19 as an occupational injury, some workers still have difficulties in relating the SARS-CoV-2 infection with work in health care, characterizing it as an occupational injured. Everyone should be guided and trained regarding the recognition of COVID-19 as an occupational injury and notify its occurrence, since the definition of the infection as a notifiable disease already exists.