Investigating the health risks of surgical smoke and evaluating the level of awareness of employees about its complications in the operating rooms of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences hospitals

Abstract

Introduction: Surgical smoke contains hazardous substances and inhalation of smoke can lead to adverse health effects. The present study was carried out in order to investigate the prevalence of health complications of surgical smoke and the level of awareness of these complications among operating room staff of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences hospitals. Work method and materials: The present study was a descriptive-cross-sectional study that was conducted on 235 operating room personnel from all public hospitals of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. After designing a questionnaire on the prevalence of surgical smoke complications in the studied employees, necessary checks were made regarding its validity and reliability. The necessary data were collected by the questions in the questionnaire and the required information was extracted and recorded in Excel software and analyzed by SPSS software.

findings: The share of participants in this research was 16, 21, 26, 18, 9, and 10 for Sina, Shahada, Imam Reza, Shahid Madani, Taleghani, and Al-Zahra hospitals, respectively. The results of the study showed that according to the mentioned index, 80% of the participants had health complications caused by operating room equipment. Also, 68% of participants had poor awareness, 29% had average awareness, and only 4% of participants had good level awareness of the studied subjects about the prevalence of health complications did not show any significant difference from each other (p = 0.241).