Dentist's ergonomic assessment by RULA method and its relationship with musculoskeletal disorders

The dentistry profession is one of the most injuring professions that causes most pains and hurts for dentists because of their lack of knowledge about the ergonomic position through the work. The purpose of this study was to assess the ergonomic position of dentists with RULA method in dentists of Bojnord.
In this cross-sectional study, all of the Bojnord’s county dentists were selected. RULA method and Nowerdik questionnaire were used for investigating the agronomical position, and muscular-skeleton position, respectively. The analysis was done by SPSS22 using regression and chi-square test. A P-value of less than 0.005 was assumed as significant.
The most muscle-skeleton reports were 55.6% (35 persons) related to back, 54% (34 persons) related to shoulders, 50.8% (32 persons) related to waist, and 47.6% (30 persons) related to neck aches. In the last 12 months, 90.5% of dentists reported pains from at least one of organs of their bodies and 27% were supposed to leave their works which the sex (P=0.84), length (P=0.75), and weight (P=0.38) were not significantly related to this case.
According to the results of this study educational interventions is essential to prevent the musculoskeletal disorders in dentistry.