Musculoskeletal disorders and emotional stress in public school teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Introduction: Teaching has numerous responsibilities in addition to teaching, requiring an intense cognitive, physical and psychological involvement and in particular, with the emergence of the covid pandemic 19 changes in the way of work
organization, insertion of new technologies, changes in the system education, generated changes in the daily lives of teachers, leaving them vulnerable to suffering and illness. Objective: To identify the main musculoskeletal disorders and their
relationship with emotional stress in public school teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: This is a cross-sectional observational study, where data were collected from 111 public school teachers in the State of Paraná, Brazil. A form sent
by electronic means was used, which contained questions about sociodemographic variables and also the following instruments: Nordic Questionnaire of Musculoskeletal Symptoms - QNSO, International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) short version,
the Visual Analog Pain Scale and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10). Results: The average age of the studied population was 46.78 (±7.7) years, the average time of teaching experience was 19.6 (±8.6) years, the average weekly workload was 36.22(±8.9) hours. Of the teachers evaluated, 96.4% had musculoskeletal symptoms, with the highest prevalence of reported complaints being in the cervical spine, shoulder and hip, with a mean pain intensity of 2.91 on a scale from 0 to 10. stress, 88.3% of teachers had a score categorized as “medium level of stress and 54.05% of teachers who are irregularly active. A correlation was identified between stress levels and physical activity level (r= -0.20; p=0.03), thus, the higher the stress level, the lower the level of physical activity was observed. association between having taught online classes in the last year and the presence of at least one medical leave event (X2 3.64; p=0.05). A negative correlation was found between weekly workload and stress level (-0.21; p=0.04), thus individuals with a higher weekly workload had a lower level of stress. Conclusion: In this study, there was a high prevalence of musculoskeletal
symptoms and stress in the studied population, and teachers who were less active had a higher level of stress.