Post-Pandemic Social Determination of Healthcare Workers’ Health: Lessons and Challenges in Ecuador | Chapter 7 | Disease and Health: Research Developments Vol. 4

Background: The historical and structural dynamics that connect labor and health are examined from a critical perspective based on Latin American critical epidemiology. Critical epidemiology overcomes the restrictive notion of classical epidemiology that focuses on the health-disease phenomenon from “risk factors”, focusing on the influence of economic, social, and cultural models on workers' health.

Objective: Examine the social determination of health in the healthcare community, considering working conditions and their effects during and after the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Ecuador.

Methods: A cross-sectional study from April 2020 to December 2021 that includes data from 2398 healthcare workers at Carlos Andrade Marín Hospital in Quito, Ecuador, tested for the COVID-19 virus.

Results: The social determinants of health in the healthcare collective were examined in this research along with their link to working conditions at a public hospital in Ecuador following the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that women made up 73% of the healthcare workforce. COVID-19 infected 50% of the hospital's medical personnel during the study period, and 20% acquired the virus again. The most frequently affected direct exposure groups were nursing assistants (55%) and nurses (61%).

Discussion: The link between work and health in an all-encompassing interpretative framework was reconsidered, considering historical processes about the standard lifestyle forced on employees (labor, consumption, gender, cultural relations, social supports, and organizational settings).

Conclusion: This study challenges the dominant and reductionist paradigm of exposure and risk factors operating independently and examines how workers' health is affected by harmful influences and deterioration in a dialectical process across general, specific, and individual dimensions.

 

Author (s) Details

Juan Pablo Velasco Moncayo
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador.

Lucy Baldeón Rojas
Facultad de Ciencias Médicas, Universidad, Central del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador and Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina, Universidad Central del Ecuador, Ecuador.

 

Jorge Perez-Galarza
Facultad de Ciencias Médicas, Universidad, Central del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador, Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina, Universidad Central del Ecuador, Ecuador and Epidemiology Department, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

 

Please see the book here:- https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/dhrd/v4/3932