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As medical staff, orderlies are at danger of showing negative signs of psychological health. They are exposed to many stresses that may have a negative impact on their personal lives, and they have also been subjected to the difficult condition of COVID-19 in their workplace. However, since they are not considered to be medical professionals, very few studies and interventions are focused on them. The aim of the present research was to detect the interactions among the work and family environments, as well as to analyze self-perceived mental health and burnout in people who worked as orderlies during the pandemic in public healthcare centers in Huelva (Spain), considering a set of sociodemographic variables. The field work was conducted between April and June 2020. Systematic random sampling was carried out. Information from 84 contributors was gathered through the SWING, MBI-HSS, and GHQ-12 forms. Univariate and bivariate analyzes and correlation tests were carried out. The data were analyzed and correlations were established. The majority of the participants obtained a negative interaction result of work over family. Those who had had contact with SARS-CoV-2 situations presented greater proportions of positive outcome in GHQ-12, bad work-family interaction, burnout, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. The men presented a worse general mental health state than the women. Orderlies of Huelva who have had contact with COVID-19 in their workplace present worse indicators of psychological health and greater negative interaction of work over family than those who have not had any contact with these circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Occupational risk of blood-borne infections is investigated mostly among nurses and doctors, studies concerning non-clinical health personnel (nCHP) being rare. The analysis of the occupational exposure to the hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and the history of vaccination against the HBV in the nCHP group has been the aim of the study. Material and Methods: A retrospective analysis of 458 cases of the occupational exposure to biological agents was conducted: group I – doctors (N = 121, 28%), group II – nursing staff (N = 251, 55%), group III – nCHP (N = 86, 19%). Results: In the group III the source was usually unknown (group: I – 0.83%, II – 11.16%, III – 86.05%, p < 0.001), and the proportion of individuals vaccinated against hepatitis B before the exposure was the lowest (group: I – 98.35%, II – 97.19%, III – 77.91%, p < 0.001). In this group most exposures resulted from injuries caused by needles/sharps deposited in waste sacks (60%) or anywhere outside of the medical waste container (5%). The possibility of the HBV infection risk during the exposure was found in 25 cases and was significantly more frequent in the group III. The qualification for the HBV post-exposure prophylaxis was also significantly more frequent in the group III. Conclusions: The exposure to the occupational risk of the HBV infection also concerns the non-clinical healthcare personnel. The non-clinical healthcare personnel comprises one of the main groups of the HBV post-exposure recipients. It is essential to determine the causes of the low hepatitis B vaccination coverage in the nCHP and consider introduction of mandatory vaccination in this group in Poland. Med Pr 2016;67(3):301–310

Background: Exposure to splash of body fluids is one of the common ways of transmitting blood-borne infections from patients to healthcare practitioners. Globally, there is a paucity of evidence on exposure to splash of body fluids among hospital housekeepers. This study, therefore, investigated splash of body fluid and its predisposing factors among healthcare support staff in the Greater Accra region, Ghana., Methods: An analytic cross-sectional survey was conducted among support staff in 10 major hospitals between 30 January and 31 May 2023. A multi-stage sampling procedure was the overarching technique employed, and study participants were recruited through simple random and probability proportional-to-size sampling techniques. The data analyses were conducted using STATA 15 software. The preliminary association between exposure to splash of body fluids and predisposing factors was established through Chi-square, Fisher's exact, and Mann-Whitney U tests. Log-binomial regression analyses were employed to validate the factors related to splash of body fluids at a significance level of p -value < 0.05., Results: The investigation was conducted among 149 healthcare support staff. The exposure to splash of body fluids over the past 1 year was 53.7% (95% CI: 45.3%-61.9%). The types of body fluids that were mostly encountered through these splash exposures were amniotic fluids (36.3%) and urine (23.8%). Several factors were found to be significantly associated with splash of body fluids, namely: employed as a healthcare assistant [APR = 1.61 (1.16, 2.22)], holding a supervisory position [APR = 0.24 (0.11, 0.51)], having a system in place for reporting body fluid splashes [APR = 0.61 (0.44, 0.85)], male healthcare support staff [APR = 0.62 (0.41, 0.93)], and adherence to standard precautions most of the time [APR = 1.66 (1.11, 2.48)]., Conclusion: Healthcare support staff were highly exposed to splash of body fluids. Gender, supervisory role, category of worker, reporting systems, and adherence to standard precautions were associated with exposure to splash of body fluids. Facility managers are advised to enhance the efficiency of reporting systems., Competing Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2024.)

This paper looks at the contest between trained nurses, orderlies and society ladies to occupy the role of primary caregivers to soldiers, especially in military hospitals, in the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902. It considers how nurses won the right to the post due to their training and position on wards in civilian hospitals. In gaining this position military hospitals and patient care would not be the same. Yet orderlies and society ladies had a part to play in the running of military hospitals and the nurses were dependent on both these groups to provide the best possible care to their patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of British military medicine during the First World War has long been a fruitful one for historians of gender. From the bodily inspection of recruits and conscripts through the expanding roles of women as medical care providers to the physical and emotional aftermath of conflict experienced by men suffering from war-related wounds and illness, the medical history of the war has shed important light on how the war shaped British masculinities and femininities as cultural, subjective and embodied identities. Much of this literature has, however, focused on the gendered identities of female nurses and sick and wounded servicemen. Increasingly, however, more complex understandings of the ways in which medical caregiving in wartime shaped the gender identities of male caregivers are starting to emerge. This article explores some of these emerging understandings of the masculinity of male medical caregivers, and their relationship to the wider literature around the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between warfare and medicine. It examines the ways in which the masculine identity of male medical caregivers from the ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps, namely stretcher bearers and medical orderlies, was perceived and represented both by the men themselves and those they cared for. In doing so it argues that total war played a crucial role in shaping social and cultural perceptions of caregiving as a gendered practice. It also identifies particular tensions between continuity and change in social understandings of medical care as a gendered practice which would continue to shape twentieth-century British society in the war's aftermath., Competing Interests: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author., (© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)