Occupational Health Hazards among Workers at Abo Mashhour Brick Factory

Background: Brick manufacturing had a variety of biological, chemical, physical and psychological hazards which may lead to verified health problems as respiratory disorders, accidents, muscle and hearing disorders to workers during work. Aim of study: Was to assess the occupational health hazards among workers at Abo Mashhour Brick Factory in Benha City. Research design: A descriptive research design was utilized to conduct this study. Setting: This study was carried out at Abo Mashhour Brick Factory at Warwara Village in Benha City. Sampling: Convenient sample of workers who worked in the previously mentioned setting and included 120 workers. Tools: Two tools were used for data collection. I) An interviewing questionnaire consisted of three parts: A) Socio demographic characteristics of workers and working history. b) Health problems among workers during the last six months. c) Workers knowledge regarding occupational hazards. II) Observational checklist to observe workers practices regarding occupational health hazards and environment at the Brick Factory. Results: 23.3% of workers had tingling in the extremities, 40.0% had lower back pain and 30.0% had hearing impairment. 67.5% of them had average knowledge level about occupational health hazards and 77.5% of the workers had unsatisfactory total practices level Conclusion: There was a highly statistically significant relation between workers total knowledge level and total practices level. Recommendation: Continuous health education program should be provided for workers at Brick Factory to improve their knowledge and practices regarding occupational health hazards safety measures, emergency, and first-aid measures. ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــ ــــــــــــــ