The main aim of the master's thesis was to determine whether daily ten-minute work-out exercises have a positive effect on some movement skills of pharmacy employees. We were also interested in whether pharmacy employees experience pain in certain parts of the body.
Twenty-four test subjects were enrolled in the study. We included 16 subjects in the training group, among whom there were more women (81.3%). The control group included 8 subjects in equal proportion by gender. All of them are employed by pharmacies of Javni zdravstveni zavod Mariborske lekarne Maribor.
After the institution and the employees agreed to cooperate and after presenting the project, we measured the results of the selected movement tests while making the first measurements before the exercise intervention. The adapted form of the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (Franasiak, Craven, Mosaly, & Gehrig, 2014) was used to obtain the data on the musculoskeletal disorders from the employees of the pharmacy.
After a seven-week training period, we again measured the results of movement tests and obtained information on musculoskeletal disorders and the incidence of pain in each area of the body.
Data was statistically processed in IBM SPSS 21 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Illinois, USA) and stylistically edited in Microsoft Excel 2016 (Microsoft Corporation, Seattle, Washington, USA). Numerical data was presented with averages and standard errors of the mean, numerical ordinal data was presented with median and standard errors of the median, while descriptive data was presented in frequencies and frequency distributions. A t-test for independent samples was used to compare the training and control group averages in the selected exercise test. All treatments were performed at a 5% risk level.
We have found that a daily ten-minute exercise has a positive effect on the development of pharmacy employees’ physical fitness. We also found that pharmacy employees most often experience lower back pain (63% of test subjects), knee pain (46% of test subjects), neck pain (46% of test subjects) and shoulders pain (42% of test subjects). The effect of exercise on pain reduction after exercise intervention was not identified, as there were no statistically significant changes before and after exercise.
The findings and data obtained can be of assistance to those involved in the organization of workplace exercise and to all pharmacy employees who wish to reduce the impact of some of the negative effects of the standing work position.
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