Abstract
Current literature on surgeons in human medicine provides evidence that surgeons often work in awkward positions for extended periods of time, suggesting there are significant physical ergonomic risk factors associated with the work demands of the role. These risk factors are likely also present in surgical work in veterinary medicine. In this study, 212 members of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons responded to a survey regarding various work-related activities and their experience with musculoskeletal symptoms in 10 different body regions. Across all 10 regions, reported pain increased significantly from before to after a typical day of surgery. Worker factors that were shown to be related to reported pain include gender, weight, age, and years performing surgery. Among work factors investigated, number of procedures, practice focus, and proportion of minimally invasive surgery were shown to influence reported pain. Our findings confirm that musculoskeletal symptoms are commonly experienced by veterinary surgeons.
Keywords
Introduction
Compared to practitioners in human medicine, veterinarians and their staff suffer a 2.9-times higher incidence rate for accidents (Nienhaus et al., 2005). Current literature on surgeons in human medicine provides evidence that surgeons often work in awkward positions for extended periods of time, suggesting there are significant physical ergonomic risk factors associated with the work demands of the role, which are likely also present in surgical work in veterinary medicine as demonstrated by Figure 1 (Asadi et al., 2022; Dalager et al., 2019; Szeto et al., 2009). This study investigates the relationship between worker and work factors with musculoskeletal symptoms among veterinary surgeons.
A veterinary surgeon is seen bending at the neck to aid in visualization.
Methods
E-mail contacts of board-certified members of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons (ACVS) were used to distribute a survey over two weeks in February 2021. In total, 212 fully complete survey responses were analyzed in R 4.2.1 out of the 1,031 ACVS members contacted.
Results
Analysis of reported pain in 10 different body regions showed that across all 10 regions, reported pain increased significantly from before to after a typical day of surgery with the neck and lower back showing the largest effect (p < 0.01). Worker factors that were shown to be related to reported pain include gender, weight, age, and years performing surgery. Among work factors investigated, number of procedures, practice focus, and proportion of minimally invasive surgery were shown to influence reported pain.
Discussion
Our findings confirm that musculoskeletal symptoms are commonly experienced by veterinary surgeons. Additionally, our analysis discovered that pain increased significantly from before to after a day of surgery, suggesting that the workload demands of veterinary surgery are contributing to pain across all body regions. Our results provide evidence for the need to control physical work demands faced by veterinary surgeons. This evidence may aid in the formation of evidence-based organizational guidelines to help reduce the prevalence and severity of musculoskeletal symptoms among veterinary surgeons.
