COVID-19 Risk Factors among Health Care Workers: A Systematic Review

Health care workers have direct contact with COVID-19 infected patients and healthy people, so ensuring the safety of health care workers is important not only to protect them against the coronavirus but also to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the community. The aim of this review was to determine the risk factors of COVID-19 among health care workers.

In this systematic review, papers related to COVID-19 risk factors among health care workers were assessed. Search for papers was done with focusing on the risk factors of COVID-19 and healthcare professionals and combining appropriate keywords, without limiting the type of study and publishing year, in the scientific databases Pubmed, MEDLINE, Embase, Google Scholar and EBSCOHost.

Out of 1750 papers, after removing duplicate papers and reviewing title, abstract and full text, 15 papers remained for data extraction. According to these papers, the risk factors of COVID-19 among health care workers include exposure to infected people, lack of appropriate personal protective equipment, heavy workload, poor infection control and direct contact with contaminated surfaces, lack of hand hygiene and underlying disease (hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic lung disease, and immunodeficiency).

In the COVID-19 pandemic, health care workers are exposed to the occupational risk of morbidity and mortality, so the development of rapid and sustainable measures for comprehensive protection of health care workers is needed.