Abstract:
Background: With industrialization, radical changes in the life of many rapidly developing countries are observable. But lack of well-designed personal protective equipment and appropriate safety measures leads to serious adverse health problems in wood and metal workshop workers resulting with major public health problems which result in serious social and economic consequences that could be prevented if appropriate measures are taken. The idea of workers’ safety and health is still new in Ethiopia. There are limited studies describing personal protective equipment utilization in Ethiopia.
Objective: To assess the magnitude of utilization of personal protective equipment and associated factors among wood and metal workshops workers in Ambo town 2021.
Methods: facility based cross-sectional study design was used to collect data and computer generated online random sampling was used to select wood and metal workshops included in the study and by non-probability method all workers working in selected wood and metal workshops in Ambo town were interviewed using structured questionnaire. Collected data were cleaned and entered to epi-data version 3.1 then exported to SPSS version 20. Descriptive statistic was used to analyse socio-demographic characteristics, and binary logistic regression was done to identify strength of associations between the dependent variable and independent variables. Finally, variables with P-value<0.25 were included in the multivariable logistic regression model to identify factors associated with PPE utilization at p-value ≤ 0.05. The odds ratio at p-value <0.05, with a 95%confidence interval (CI) was used to test the statistical significance of variables. Results were presented using tables, graphs and charts.
Results: The magnitude of PPE utilization was 36.81% in Ambo town. no-formal education [AOR: 11.12, 95 % CI: (1.202,102.81,)], occurrence hazard [AOR: 1.83, 95 % CI: (1.109, 3.02)], training given related to job [AOR: 2.59, 95 % CI: (1.237, 5.41)], access for PPE [AOR: 2.897, 95 % CI: (1.377, 6.09)], the average working time per day [AOR: 2.164, 95 % CI: (1.138, 4.11)], were factors significantly associated with utilization of personal protective equipment.
Conclusion: Bright light, welding fumes, wood dust and flying sparks and particles were well-known hazards among workers. Workers were aware of PPE but many didn’t use PPE. The wood and metal work health impacts were widely mentioned by workers, such as burns, conjunctivitis, and irritation of eyes, nose and airway were major problems
