Özet:

In today’s world, in addition to the risks at work in other sectors, health care workers are also subject to different risks due to the nature of their jobs. Health care workers are exposed to various kinds of professional risks like needle stick injuries, lower back and back problems, allergies, violence and stress. All these risk factors result in decreasing work performance, increasing accidents at work and adversely affect the security of both patients and health staff. For this reason, this manuscript was designed to emphasize professional risks for health staff and contribute to planning of health services for health staff. The studies on health professionals do not have a long history in Turkey. Various regulations have been started to be implemented on health and safety of health staff in line with the directive about patient and health staff safety enacted only 1 year ago in 2012. Accordingly, efforts have been made to prepare committee on operation safety in hospitals, prepare its program, provide counseling to staff, health screening and prepare personal protection measures against infections and immunization and alleviate the severity. This situation brings forward the questions of health and security of health care workers. With the recent regulations in Turkey, occupational health and safety units have started to be established in private and public hospitals; however, they still have certain shortcomings in number, equipment, personnel and services, and applications could differ among institutions, from region to region, and from person to person. As health status of health workers is considered as a factor affecting public health, it is recommended to determine problems in realizing comprehensive occupational health and safety policies for health care workers including both public and private health sectors within the scope of national laws and procedures and find suitable solutions for these problems.

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