A health comparison of Alabama nurses versus US, UK, and Canadian normative populations

This article is one of a two part series examining the people and environment associated with patient handling. The approach used was that of an occupational injury investigation of a job class, which incorporates defining in the task, environment, tools, and worker health status. Hence, the objective of this portion of the research was to develop a method and use it to compare the physical and mental health of Alabama nurses with known normative populations to determine a baseline of overall health. For this purpose, the validated SF-36© survey was used to collect data on Alabama nurses who had been registered in the state for at least one year. The potential participant pool included 1000 nurses randomly selected from more than 49,000 registered. Physical mailers with a pre-paid return envelope and a follow-up reminder post-card were used. A return rate of 10% was expected based on nursing literature. One hundred and one surveys were returned with 87 being complete. Results confirmed that nursing in the US is a female dominated profession with the survey matching both the Alabama and US national average of 92%. Comparisons of the sample data to general populations yielded significant differences in 3 of the 8 outcome measures: social functioning; physical functioning; bodily pain. In each of these measures, Alabama nurses had a reduced health status compared to at least one comparative population. Additionally, data related to body mass index (BMI) for Alabama nurses were stratified by gender and age. Results indicated 28% had a “healthy” BMI with 37% and 35% of the nurses being “overweight” or “obese”, respectively. Consequently, results suggest Alabama nurses have a reduced health status compared to normative populations and show similar but not identical BMI trends to the general populations for the state of Alabama and the US, which warrants concerns about potential declines in health status among caregivers.

Significance to healthcare

Nurses constitute the largest proportion of the healthcare industry’s workforce. Understanding the perceptions of health status of this employee group is essential to gain further information about possible influences of health on nurses’ ability to continue to perform their jobs.