Exploring musculoskeletal injuries in the podiatry profession: an international cross sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Workplace injury is an international costly burden. Health care workers are an essential component to managing musculoskeletal disorders, however in doing this, they may increase their own susceptibility. While there is substantial evidence about work‐related musculoskeletal disorders across the health workforce, understanding risk factors in specific occupational groups, such as podiatry, is limited. The primary aim of this study was to determine the prevalence and intensity of work related low back pain in podiatrists. Methods This was an international cross‐sectional survey targeting podiatrists in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The survey had two components; general demographic variables and variables relating to general musculoskeletal pain in general or podiatry work‐related musculoskeletal pain. Multivariable regression analyses were used to identify factors associated with musculoskeletal stiffness and pain and low back pain intensity. Thematic analysis was used to group comments podiatrists made about their musculoskeletal health. Results There were 948 survey responses (5% of Australian, New Zealand and United Kingdom registered podiatrists). There were 719 (76%) podiatrists reporting musculoskeletal pain as a result of their work practices throughout their career. The majority of injuries reported were in the first five years of practice (n = 320, 45%). The body area reported as being the location of the most significant injury was the low back (203 of 705 responses, 29%). Being female (p < 0.001) and working in private practice (p = 0.003) was associated with musculoskeletal pain or stiffness in the past 12 months. There were no variables associated with pain or stiffness in the past four weeks. Being female was the only variable associated with higher pain (p = 0.018). There were four main themes to workplace musculoskeletal pain: 1. Organisational and procedural responses to injury, 2. Giving up work, taking time off, reducing hours, 3. Maintaining good musculoskeletal health and 4. Environmental change. Conclusions The postures that podiatrists hold while treating patients appear to impact on musculoskeletal pain and stiffness. Recently graduated and female podiatrists are at higher risk of injury. There is a need for the profession to consider how they move and take care of their own musculoskeletal health.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".