The Occupational Health of Nurses in the Economic Community of West African States: A Review of the Literature

This issue of Workplace Health & Safety contains a Continuing Nursing Education Module for 1.0 contact hour of continuing nursing education credit will be awarded by AAOHN upon successful completion of the posttest and evaluation.

A certificate will be awarded when the following requirements are met by the participant: (1) Participant logs on to the AAOHN LMS website at www.aaohn.org/education/online-learning-center and enrolls in the course ($10 members; $15 non-members); (2) The completed posttest and course evaluation are entered online at http://www.aaohn.org by May 2021; (3) A score of 75% (6 correct answers) is achieved by the participant.

Upon completion of this lesson, the occupational health nurse will be able to:

• Identify the most common causes for health care workers acquiring bloodborne illnesses in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

• Understand processes that can improve the occupational health of nurses in the ECOWAS regions.

The American Association of Occupational Health Nurses, Inc. is an Approved Provider of continuing nursing education by the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses, Inc., an accredited approver by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation. The American Association of Occupational Health Nurses, Inc. is additionally approved as a CNE provider by the California Board of Registered Nursing (#CEP9283).

Contact hours received for successful completion of the posttest and evaluation may be used for relicensure, certification, and re-certification.

1. The purpose of this article was to:

2. Enforce the appropriate donning of masks and gloves

3. Identify the appropriate chain-of-command for reporting exposure to a bloodborne illness

4. Review and synthesize the literature regarding exposure to bloodborne illnesses in the ECOWAS during a specified time period.

Nurses practicing in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) are at high risk of acquiring a bloodborne illness due to:

Overuse of needles and syringes

Wearing the wrong respiratory mask

Limited access to personal protective equipment

Donning of inappropriate size gloves

Inclusion criteria for the systematic review for this study included all of the following except:

Published articles after January 2008

Articles published in English and Nigerian

Addressed at least one element of the `Hierarchy of Controls’

Articles pertained to licensed nurses currently working in a health care setting

The most common hazard control method examined in this systemic literature review was:

Elimination hazard controls

Administrative hazard controls

Engineering hazard controls

Personal Protective Equipment hazard controls

Examples of engineering-based controls include:

Substituting an oral medication for an intravenous medication

Placement of color-coded bins for needle disposal

Instituting universal standard precautions

Ensuring all health care workers receive HBV immunization

Most of the studies in the literature review were conducted in these member countries of the ECOWAS region:

Niger and Ghana

Mali and Nigeria

Nigeria and Ghana

Nigeria and Gambia

The United Nations and the World Health Organization identified these problems that inhibited recruiting and retaining health care workers in the ECOWAS region:

All the countries in the ECOWAS region are too hot to work in

There are too many languages spoken in the ECOWAS region which presents a language barrier problem

Church-run hospitals lack much needed equipment to be able to work safely in these sites

Poor working conditions in the ECOWAS region contribute to the shortage of health care workers

The study limitations identified in this study included:

A lack of a control group

No identified statistical heterogeneity

Potential bias from self-report survey methods

Quality assessment methods were not standardized