The SIN-DME Questionnaire (Symptoms of INconfort Associated with Muscle Skeletal Disorders

This research was carried out between 2010 and 2017; the objective was to develop the Intervention Protocol for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders, the research followed three phases as follows: the first one dealt with the design of the protocol and the analysis tools, the second one focused on the adjustment of the intervention and modeling processes of the tools and the third one on the validation of the protocol and its operation in the companies.

In total, the applications of the tools and the validation of the development were carried out with the results obtained from 97 companies from 11 economic sectors that participated; from this universe of companies a sample of 2648 workers was constituted. This is a self-assessment questionnaire of WMSD’s-related symptoms, designed in the category of questionnaires that focus on identification through the perception of health by individuals.

In this regard, it should be noted that previous studies carried out by the scientific team of the ergonomics laboratory of the University of Rosario, started from the hypothesis that groups of workers with some pathology associated with WMSD’s would present a low perception of health, however, it was found that most of the workers perceived their own state of health as excellent. This is explained because when the symptomatology of the pathology presented by the worker does not prevent or condition the activities of daily life, people will perceive that they have an adequate state of health [1]. The questionnaire uses validated information, scales and the development of visual identification items to bring the representations of individuals closer to the estimates made. The conceptual objective for the development of the questionnaire is to record and measure the prevalence of symptoms in workers who may be associated with a musculoskeletal disorder, with the purpose of verifying the presence of symptoms later through a more exhaustive evaluation of health conditions.