RESUMEN
Occupational physicians (OPs) offer a wide range of health support for employees and are confronted with varying job characteristics and demands. They monitor occupational health and safety and promote work(place)-related health measures and assessments. While helping employees to (re)gain a healthy status, their own job satisfaction as well as the investigation of their working conditions have earned limited research attention. Thus, this scoping review aims to summarize the current state of knowledge concerning OPs' working conditions, i.e., work-related resources and stressors. PubMed, Web of Science and LIVIVO as well as grey literature were screened for relevant English or German articles until 10/2021. From a total of 1683 identified publications, we analyzed 24 full text articles that fulfilled all inclusion criteria. The overall study sample included 3486 male (54.6%), 2892 female (45.3%) and 5 diverse OPs, from which 1049 OPs worked in full-time (85.6%) and 177 in part-time (14.4%). The majority (72.4%) worked for the Occupational Health Service (OHS), 13% were self-employed, and 14.6% worked for a company/in-house service. The classification of stressors and resources was based on an inductively generated categorization scheme. We categorized 8 personal, relational and environmental resources and 10 stress factors. The main resources were support for personnel development and promotion, positive organizational policy, promoting work-life balance and other aspects of health. Key stressors were information deficits, organizational deficiency and uncertainty as well as socioeconomic influences and high professional obligations. The working conditions of OPs are still a topic with too little research attention. This scoping review reveals several starting points to maintain a healthy OP workforce and gives recommendations for action for the near future.
Asunto(s)
Servicios de Salud del Trabajador , Salud Laboral , Médicos , Femenino , Personal de Salud , Humanos , Satisfacción en el Trabajo , MasculinoRESUMEN
INTRODUCTION: Evidence-based clinical practice guidelines are one of the most important sources to inform clinical decision-making. They contain recommendations to support treatment decisions. These recommendations should be free from bias and should only aim to increase patient benefit. To ensure this, recommendations should be free from bias caused by conflicts of interest. When conflicts of interest exist, they should be completely transparent. The aim of this study was to analyze the payments from pharmaceutical and medical device industry to clinical practice guideline panel members (GPM). In addition, we assessed the completeness and accuracy of the GPMs' conflict of interest statements. METHODS: A manual search for international guidelines was conducted on the website of the National Guideline Clearinghouse. We included all available clinical practice guidelines published in 2017. We extracted the names of all guideline group members and identified the payments they had received from industry over the four years preceding the publication using the "open payments" database. RESULTS: In total, 81 guidelines were identified. We found data on payments for 543 out of 659 GPMs. For 34% of the GPMs, there was no declaration of individual conflicts of interest in either the guideline or related documents. The sum of payments across all guidelines to all GPMs was 10,844,938 USD. The average payment amounted to 19,972 USD and the median 1,227 USD. Sixty two percent of GPMs received at least 500 USD. Of these, 17% stated that they had no conflict of interest to declare. DISCUSSION: The amount of industrial payments in some subject areas raises doubt about the independence of guideline recommendations. Stricter rules are needed to avoid and manage conflicts of interest of guideline authors. The analysis carried out indicates that conflict of interest involving GPMs is a considerable problem. CONCLUSION: GPMs receive sizeable payments from industry. The payments are often inadequately disclosed or not disclosed at all. This threatens the objectivity of the recommendations in clinical practice guidelines.
