Abstract
Health care workers are responsible for the ex- ecution of the health policy of a nation, yet little if any empirical evidence is there on health, lifestyle, health choices, and health conditions of health care workers in the rural parish of Hanover, Jamaica. The current study examines health, lifestyle and health behaviour among health professional in Hanover. The current study has a sample of 212 respondents. A 26- item questionnaire was used to collect the data. Data from the questionnaires were coded and entered into a micro-computer and analysis done using SPSS for Widows Version 15.0 soft- ware. The Chi-square test was used to test as- sociation between non-metric variables. A p- value < 0.05 (two-tailed) was selected to indicate statistical significance. It was found that 16.0% of respondents had diabetes mellitus (2.8% of males compared to 19.8% females); 22.6% had hypertension (25.5% of female and 12.8% of males); 0.5% breast cancer; 0.5% stomach cancer; 1.9% enlarged heart; and 0.5% ischemic heart disease. Forty-three percentage points of the sample was overweight, 33.5% obese and 24.1% had a normal weight. Over 15% of nurses and doctors were obese compared to 38% of ancillary staffers. Twenty percentage points of respondents consume alcohol on a regular ba- sis; 15.6% do no regular physical exercise, 42.4% add sweetening to their hot beverages, and 4.7% were smokers. There is a need for public health practitioners to formulate a health intervention programme that will target people in Hanover, but also specific groups such as doctors, nurses, administrative, ancillary sta- ffers and technical staffers.
Highlights
It is well established that poverty and illness are positive associated with each other and that 80% of all chronic illnesses were in low-to-middle income countries [1,2,3]
Just over 15% of nurses and medical doctors were obese compared to 38.2% of ancillary staffers (Table 4)
The current study has revealed pertinent information on the perception of health care workers about healthy lifestyle, health choices and general perception of residents in Hanover on their health
Summary
It is well established that poverty and illness are positive associated with each other and that 80% of all chronic illnesses were in low-to-middle income countries [1,2,3]. The World health organization (WHO) [2] reported that 60% of global mortality is caused by chronic illness and four-fifths of chronic dysfunctions are in low-to-middle income countries. This concurs with Sen’s finding that poverty does predisposed people to illnesses but that it accounts for premature mortality. Despite Bourne’s findings, the level of poverty in Jamaica was 9.9% in 2007 This was 15.3% in rural areas compared to 6.2% in urban and 4.0% in peri-urban area [7]. Another important finding is that rural residents indicated the highest percentage points of illness (17.3%) compared to urban (14.1%) and Openly accessible at http://www.scirp.org/journal/HEALTH/
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