Abstract
In the last few years, the occupational health (OH) of healthcare workers (HCWs) has been shown increasing concern by both health departments and researchers. This study aims to provide academics with quantitative and qualitative analysis of healthcare workers’ occupational health (HCWs+OH) field in a joint way. Based on 402 papers published from 1992 to 2019, we adopted the approaches of bibliometric and social network analysis (SNA) to map and quantify publication years, research area distribution, international collaboration, keyword co-occurrence frequency, hierarchical clustering, highly cited articles and cluster timeline visualization. In view of the results, several hotspot clusters were identified, namely: physical injuries, workplace, mental health; occupational hazards and diseases, infectious factors; community health workers and occupational exposure. As for citations, we employed document co-citation analysis to detect trends and identify seven clusters, namely tuberculosis (TB), strength training, influenza, healthcare worker (HCW), occupational exposure, epidemiology and psychological. With the visualization of cluster timeline, we detected that the earliest research cluster was occupational exposure, then followed by epidemiology and psychological; however, TB, strength training and influenza appeared to gain more attention in recent years. These findings are presumed to offer researchers, public health practitioners a comprehensive understanding of HCWs+OH research.
Highlights
In April 2019, the International Labour Organization (ILO) declared a mortality of nearly three million workers worldwide due to occupation-related diseases or accidents on an annual basis, and with another 374 million people injured in occupation-related accidents, which is “unacceptable loss of life” [1], as officials put it
Bibliometric was used for Performance Analysis and Science Mapping, including analysis and evaluation of the publication years, research area distribution, document co-citation network, international productivity and collaboration, highly cited articles and cluster timeline visualization
Combing bibliometric and time series predictive analysis, we found that both the number and percentage of articles about healthcare workers (HCWs)+occupational health (OH) among the total articles related to OH in Web of Science database Core Collection (WOSCC) indicated an increase trend
Summary
In April 2019, the International Labour Organization (ILO) declared a mortality of nearly three million workers worldwide due to occupation-related diseases or accidents on an annual basis, and with another 374 million people injured in occupation-related accidents, which is “unacceptable loss of life” [1], as officials put it. Healthcare workers (HCWs) make up 12% of the workforce [2]. Hospital passed away as a result of a severe violent injury inflicted by a patient, this aroused public concern for the occupational health (OH) of HCWs. A healthcare worker (HCW) is defined as any individual whose work is in a medical environment; it includes but is not limited to doctors, nurses, nursing assistants, operation theater technicians, community healthcare workers, pharmacists, etc. HCWs who fight for others’ health may encounter risks from strenuous manual labor, Int. J. Public Health 2020, 17, 2625; doi:10.3390/ijerph17082625 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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