Total Worker Health®: knowledge of a sample of Occupational Physicians and Prevention and Protection Service Managers.

Background: In the workplace, it is increasingly important to promote interventions to improve the work environment that can combine compliance with regulations related to worker health and safety protection with health promotion interventions. The objective of our study is to investigate the status of the implementation of various health management measures through questionnaires submitted to Occupational Physicians (OPs) and Prevention and Protection Service Managers (PPSMs). Methods: This study was conducted between September 2022 and November 2022. Healthcare professionals were invited to voluntarily answer the questions, administered through a Google form, of a standardized questionnaire (Cronbach's alpha=0.887) based on the study made by Hoge et al. (2019): the first part collected demographic information and the other four were relating to the state of implementation of interventions attributable to the Total Worker Health® approach. Results: 89 OPs and PPSMs were involved. The univariate and multivariate analysis shows that, overall, women and PPSMs have a higher degree of dissatisfaction related to various health management measures within companies; most workers are fairly satisfied with health and safety protection in the workplace; finally, according to healthcare professionals, aspects of primary prevention and work management/organization would need to be improved. Conclusions: This study shows that in Italian companies there is often no full application of Total Worker Health® principles. The affirmation of this approach, awareness should be raised, first and foremost, among employers, but also among prevention figures and consultants about all the benefits of Total Worker Health®: one among all, an 'economic' advantage.

Contact tracing as an essential prevention tool for the spreading of COVID-19 among healthcare workers.

Abstract: Healthcare workers, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been universally recognized as especially susceptible, with infection risks higher than the general population. Therefore, it is important to apply infection prevention and control measures in healthcare institutions to limit infections associated with the provision of healthcare services. In this contest, contact tracing, in fact, is an essential public health measure to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, with active case finding and testing, and physical distancing. Globally, new weekly cases and deaths are decreased, but WHO emphasizes that cases and deaths should be interpreted with caution because several countries have been progressively changing COVID-19 testing strategies, resulting in lower overall numbers of tests performed and consequently lower numbers of cases detected. Health personnel, therefore, work at a high-risk department and this has been associated with a 2.13 times higher risk of COVID-19 compared to the general departments of any hospital and, if the healthcare workers had inability to continue working and if there was the possibility of hospitals turning into sources of infection, it could be an interruption in healthcare services. A coordination with the system of surveillance is important that remains in the hospital in order to fight COVID-19 and help restructure the response in the light of detected transmission and guarantee safe hospital care.