A THESIS PROPOSAL SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF GONDAR, , COLLEGE OF MEDICINE AND HEALTH SCIENCES, INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC HEALTH IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE REQIEREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF PUBLIC HEALTH IN OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Abstract

SUMMARY INTRODUCTION Occupational hazard is the risk, harm, or danger that an individual is exposed to at the workplace, whereas occupational diseases result from such exposures to the individual. Welding, cutting, and brazing are hazardous activities which pose a unique combination of both safety and health risks to over 500,000 workers in a wide variety of industries. The risk from fatal injuries alone is more than four deaths per thousand workers over a working lifetime. OSHA is developing an action plan which will reduce worker exposures to these hazards but is not initiating rulemaking at this time.. The triad of Knowledge, Attitude and Practice together make up the dynamic system of life itself.. KAP survey among factory workers is a way to collect information on what is known or understood, their preconceived beliefs or feelings and how they demonstrate their knowledge and attitudes through their actions with the aim to plan, implement and evaluate interventional strategies. OBJECTIVE; To assess Knowledge and practice on Prevention of Physical hazards among Welding workers in Small enterprise in Gondar town, North west Ethiopia. METHODS; Institutional based cross sectional quantitative study design will be conducted from January to May 2016 among 422. Stratified simple random select study participants to achieve the planned objectives .data will be collected using pre taste structured self-administrate questionnaire retraining of data collectors and supervisors, awareness creation among study participants and strong supportive supervision of data collectors will be done to ensure data quality. The collected data will be edited manually entered into computer via Epi info version 3.5.3 for further editing and exported to SPSS version 20.0 for analysis .Frequencies and descriptive statistics will be employed to describe the study objective . Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis will be used to show the impact of independent variables on outcome variables ,at 95% confidence level will be used to express the degree of association. . WORK PLAN AND BUDGET; The study will be conducted from January to May 2016 divided into three phase’s that is proposal writing and defense, training and data collection, analysis and processing using the overall budget of 23,718.20 Ethiopian Birr. Keywords: Welding, Small industries, Physical Hazards, Knowledge and Practice