A study to assess the effect of self instructional module on knowledge regarding prevention of occupational health hazards among computer operators working in Dr. D. Y. Patil institute of Pune city

Abstract

The long time use of computers and stay in static position may results in computer related serious harms like back pain, neck pain, repeated strain injuries, computer vision syndrome. The aim of study: 1) To assess the existing knowledge on occupational health hazard among computer operators 2) To evaluate the effect of selfinstructional module on knowledge of occupational health hazards among computer operators 3) To correlate the knowledge on occupation health hazards with selected demographic variables among computer operators. A total of 50 computer operators working in Dr. D.Y. Patil associated colleges in Pune, Maharashtra, India were participated in the study. The data were collected through structured knowledge questionnaire which includes the 7 items on demographic variables, 20 items to assess the knowledge regarding prevention of occupational health hazard and self instructional module was introduced to impart the knowledge.Most of the subjects were young (60%) with near 52% females. Half of the subjects had graduate level of education and 44% had less than 5 years of experience. 60% of the subjects had 4-6 hour of daily exposure to computers. The present study shows that the mean pretest and posttest knowledge score was 9.04 and 18.24 respectively. The difference between mean scores is 9.2 and the calculated “t” value is 3.23, which was highly significant at the level of P<0.05. This indicates that self instructional module was found to be effective in increasing the knowledge of the computer operators regarding prevention of occupational health hazards.