A RESEARCH ON THE EVALUATION OF THERMAL COMFORT CONDITIONS OF OPERATING ROOM EMPLOYEES

Occupational health and safety is a law-supported science that aims to prevent accidents that may occur in workplace environments and to minimize exposure to occupational diseases. Occupational hygiene includes identifying, measuring, and analyzing the physical, chemical, ergonomic and biological risks that employees are exposed to in their working environment. Whether the exposures in the working environment are at a level that will affect human health is determined by making measurements and analyses with some standards. One of the most important factors in the physical risks group is thermal comfort. In working environments where thermal comfort is not balanced, diseases caused by exposure to heat and cold may occur, and the risk of occupational accidents increases due to not paying attention to the work being done. Measurements are made using the TS EN ISO 7730 standard to evaluate the thermal comfort in the working environment. In this study, thermal comfort measurements were carried out in the operating room rooms, which the employees described as cold. Our aim is to determine whether the operating room workers are exposed to cold stress. The measurements were carried out in 12 different operating room rooms of a research hospital. It was observed that PMV indexes remained within the limit values. The highest PPD index was calculated as 34.11%. The findings of this study show that there is no cold stress exposure in the operating room rooms where the study was carried out.