Osha Safety Problems

CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG 香港城市大學

Occupational Health Problems for Teachers from Primary and Secondary Schools in Hong Kong 香港中小學教師的職業健康問題

Submitted to Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management 製造工程及工程管理學系 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy 哲學碩士學位

by

Chong Yin Ling 莊燕玲 June 2006 二零零六年六月

Abstract

Although many researches can be found on teaching profession of different countries, most of them mainly addressed teacher’s stress problems. It seems that the global public focuses on stress problem but passes over the prevalence of somatic health problems in the teaching profession. This study is the first single study in Hong Kong that comprehensively covers not only the mental health and stress problems, but also the somatic health problems as well as the related working days lost in teaching profession. A questionnaire was designed and the required data were collected via a questionnaire survey. It was a large-scale survey with 6,000 copies of questionnaires sent out and the number of usable questionnaires returned by the primary or secondary school teachers was 1,710. After collating and analyzing the collected statistics, a comprehensive report of occupational health problems, including work-related mental and physical problems as well as occupational stress problems for the teaching profession of Hong Kong was compiled. Research results indicated that the prevalence of work-related subjective health complaints was very high that 99.5% (n = 1,702) of respondents suffered at least one type of complaint on the total Subjective Health Complaint Scale with 39 items during the preceding 30 days. The ten most frequently reported work-related health complaints among the teachers were tiredness, eyestrain, anxiety, voice disorder, sleep problems, shoulder pain, neck pain, headache, sadness/depression, and low back pain. Both the prevalence (92.4%) and intensity (mean: 2.43) of...