Occupational hazards and workplace safety practices among nurses in Nablus, Palestine: a cross-sectional study

Hospital nurses encounter physical, ergonomic, biological, chemical, psychological, and social occupational hazards. Although these hazards are widely recognized, a knowledge gap remains in Palestine regarding multidimensional work-related symptoms examined together with selected workplace exposure, prevention, personal protective equipment, and organizational safety practices.

An analytical cross-sectional study included 140 registered nurses from medical, surgical, pediatric, and gynecology/obstetrics departments at three hospitals in Nablus, Palestine. The final analytical sample represented 87.5% of the 160 distributed questionnaires. Data were collected using an English-language structured questionnaire comprising demographic and professional characteristics, the Work-Related Symptom Scale (WRSS), and 18 study-specific heterogeneous workplace items. Because the 18 items mixed exposure conditions, preventive behaviors, personal protective equipment, cognitive demands, and organizational practices, they were interpreted primarily at item level rather than as a validated unidimensional scale. Analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics, Version 19.0; subgroup comparisons were treated as exploratory.

Physical symptoms were reported more frequently than psychological and social symptoms. Sleep disturbances were rated present by 37.9% and highly present by 19.3% of participants; corresponding values were 33.6% and 21.4% for leg pain and 31.4% and 20.7% for back pain. Psychological and social symptoms were generally reported at lower perceived levels than physical symptoms, although underreporting cannot be excluded. Among the study-specific workplace items, the highest proportions selecting "always" were observed for hand washing (60.7%), direct contact with patients (56.4%), general safety measures (55.0%), mask use (55.0%), and documented incident reporting (50.7%). In exploratory subgroup analysis, female nurses had a higher mean physical WRSS score than male nurses (3.17 vs. 2.73; mean difference 0.44; p = 0.002).

The findings identify a prominent pattern of sleep-related and musculoskeletal symptoms among nurses in the participating Nablus hospitals and heterogeneous responses across workplace exposure, prevention, personal protective equipment, and organizational safety items. These cross-sectional self-reported findings may inform consideration of targeted ergonomic risk assessment, safe-patient-handling support, task-specific personal protective equipment policies, incident-reporting systems, and department-level occupational safety planning. Causal and population-wide inferences should be avoided.

Not applicable.