The study, led by Shuyan Jin of Shenzhen Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital, Alexandra Fernandes of ISCTE-IUL in Lisbon, and Dong Wang of Southern Medical University, is unusual in that it unfolds in two phases. The first phase built and validated a measurement scale for what the authors call perceived knowledge infrastructure capability, or KIC—the foundational organizational capacity that enables effective knowledge management through technological, structural, and cultural conditions. The second phase applied that scale in a cross-sectional survey of physicians in Shenzhen’s maternal and child health institutions, using structural equation modeling to probe its associations with three distinct facets of job satisfaction: intrinsic, extrinsic, and general satisfaction.

The context matters. China’s maternal and child health institutions are government-established, non-profit specialized providers with a public-health mandate, delivering both preventive services and basic medical care for women and children. Declining fertility rates have reduced birth volumes, while a rising share of advanced-age mothers and high-risk pregnancies has raised the technical complexity and risk profile of the work that remains. Shenzhen, a megacity of more than 17 million permanent residents—about 7.89 million of them women, with migrants accounting for more than 65 percent of the population—exemplifies these shifting demands. Against this backdrop, physician job satisfaction is not a soft metric: nationwide surveys indicate that clinical physicians’ satisfaction in China remains at a low level, and low satisfaction among healthcare workers has been linked to turnover intention, with direct implications for patient safety and service quality.

In the first phase, the researchers began with a preliminary framework of three dimensions—Technology, Structure, and Culture—comprising 24 items drawn from existing knowledge management literature. They then ran two rounds of a modified Delphi consultation with 18 experts from Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and other regions, including hospital directors, management department heads, and researchers in hospital operations, clinical practice, health policy, and medical research. Expert authority coefficients ranged from 0.70 to 1.00, with a mean of 0.86, and all 18 experts returned their assessments. Following predefined screening criteria—items with mean total scores below 4.00 and coefficients of variation below 20 percent were deleted, for instance—the first round removed eight items, merged two, and optimized four.

What happened next reveals something important about measuring organizational life across cultures. Expert interviews, a 20-person pre-survey, and focus group discussions with five experts converged on the same observation: in the Chinese hospital context, respondents found it difficult to distinguish items about organizational structure from those about culture. As the authors explain, formal institutions and informal relationships and cultural norms are often highly embedded in Chinese management practice, jointly shaping how knowledge is created, shared, and retained. Drawing on the concept of knowledge governance mechanisms, the team consolidated the Structure and Culture dimensions into a single integrated construct, KGMs, and removed four further items for conceptual overlap. The final scale retained just two dimensions and 11 items: Technology, covering knowledge management systems and the hardware, software, networks, and databases supporting collaboration inside and beyond the hospital, and KGMs, covering training and continuing education systems, academic exchange, innovation incentives, colleagues’ recognition of knowledge’s value, expertise-based rewards, and senior management’s explicit emphasis on knowledge.

To validate this refined scale, the team surveyed 1,037 valid respondents from 49 healthcare institutions across 10 provinces and autonomous regions and 15 cities spanning eastern, central, and western China. Confirmatory factor analysis showed acceptable fit, with a comparative fit index of 0.980, a Tucker–Lewis index of 0.973, an RMSEA of 0.052, and an SRMR of 0.050. Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were 0.849 for Technology and 0.975 for KGMs, composite reliability exceeded 0.70 for both dimensions, average variance extracted exceeded 0.50, and the heterotrait–monotrait ratio of 0.706 fell below the 0.85 threshold for adequate discriminant validity. A single-factor comparison model fitted markedly worse, suggesting that common method bias was unlikely to be driving the observed covariation among items.

The second phase turned to Shenzhen’s 11 maternal and child health institutions, of which three were selected to reflect differences in institutional size, stage of development, and service volume. Of 366 valid physician questionnaires, 231, 101, and 34 came from the three institutions respectively. The sample was 75.7 percent female; 45.6 percent of participants were aged 35 to 44, 58.5 percent held postgraduate degrees, 41.3 percent held intermediate professional titles, and 79.0 percent worked more than 40 hours per week, with 51.9 percent performing four or more night shifts per month. Job satisfaction was measured with the widely used 20-item short form of the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire, which yields intrinsic satisfaction scores from 12 items tapping the work itself—ability use, accomplishment, creativity, responsibility, and variety—extrinsic satisfaction scores from six items covering compensation, policies, advancement, supervision, and working conditions, and a general satisfaction score across all 20 items. Internal consistency was high, with alpha coefficients of 0.949, 0.937, and 0.971 respectively.

Before modeling, the researchers observed statistically significant differences in satisfaction scores across age, professional title, years of service, monthly income, and weekly working hours. Physicians under 35 reported higher scores than those aged 35 to 44; those with fewer than 10 years of service outscored the 10-to-19-year cohort; and those earning 15,000 CNY or less per month scored higher on extrinsic and general satisfaction than the highest earners above 20,000 CNY. These characteristics were then included as covariates in three separate structural equation models, each with acceptable fit—RMSEA values of 0.035, 0.038, and 0.036 for the intrinsic, extrinsic, and general satisfaction models respectively.

The central result was strikingly asymmetric. KGMs showed significant positive associations with all three satisfaction outcomes: a standardized beta of 0.727 (95 percent confidence interval 0.553 to 0.901) for intrinsic satisfaction, 0.679 (0.492 to 0.866) for extrinsic satisfaction, and 0.724 (0.549 to 0.899) for general satisfaction. Technology, by contrast, showed no statistically significant direct association with any of the three outcomes. An exploratory mediation analysis then tested whether Technology might work on satisfaction indirectly, through KGMs. The direct associations remained non-significant, but the indirect associations through KGMs were statistically significant for all three outcomes—standardized betas of 0.600 for intrinsic, 0.561 for extrinsic, and 0.598 for general satisfaction. The authors interpret this cautiously: technological capability itself may not automatically translate into higher job satisfaction; its value may need to be realized through corresponding organizational governance mechanisms, consistent with prior research noting that technological infrastructure functions as an enabling condition whose effectiveness depends on alignment with organizational structure, management practices, and cultural environment.

The authors are careful about what this cross-sectional study can and cannot show. The observed associations do not establish temporal or causal relationships, and the application data came from only three institutions in a single city, limiting generalizability to other regions or healthcare settings. The study focused exclusively on physicians, so extrapolation to nurses or medical technicians warrants caution, and because all variables were self-reported by the same respondents, common method variance cannot be fully excluded despite the bias checks. The first Delphi round also showed relatively low consensus—Kendall’s coefficient of 0.084 for importance ratings—which rose to 0.278 in the second round after feedback. Future work, the authors suggest, should span multiple regions, include other professional groups, and adopt longitudinal designs. Still, for hospital administrators in Shenzhen and similar settings, the practical message is concrete: strengthening training and continuing education systems, academic exchange platforms, innovation incentives, expertise-based recognition, and visible managerial commitment to knowledge may offer a practical approach to supporting physician job satisfaction—while new technology, to pay off, must arrive wrapped in the governance that makes it useful.

Subject of Research: The association between perceived knowledge infrastructure capability and physician job satisfaction in Chinese maternal and child health hospitals

Article Title: Perceived knowledge infrastructure capability and physicians’ job satisfaction in Chinese maternal and child health hospitals: evidence from Shenzhen

Article References: Jin, S., Fernandes, A., & Wang, D. (2026). Perceived knowledge infrastructure capability and physicians’ job satisfaction in Chinese maternal and child health hospitals: evidence from Shenzhen. Frontiers in Public Health, 14, Article 1964250. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1964250

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2026.1964250

Keywords: knowledge infrastructure capability, knowledge governance mechanisms, job satisfaction, physicians, maternal and child health, Shenzhen, China, structural equation modeling, cross-sectional survey, healthcare management, Delphi method, occupational health

The research team recruited 392 returned Cambodian migrant workers across four provinces with high rates of labor migration in October 2022. Participants had a mean age of 34.7 years, with 52 percent men and 48 percent women. The mean overall PHQ-4 score was 2.13 (standard deviation 2.24), indicating that most respondents reported none to mild psychological distress.

Reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha, and the PHQ-4 achieved an alpha of 0.78, a value within the range conventionally described as acceptable internal consistency.

The structural question of whether the PHQ-4 measures one general distress dimension or two distinct ones was addressed with confirmatory factor analysis. The single-factor model fit the data poorly, with a comparative fit index of 0.97 but a Tucker-Lewis index of 0.78 and a root mean square error of approximation of 0.23. The two-factor model, by contrast, showed excellent fit: a CFI of 0.99, TLI of 0.98, RMSEA of 0.035 and a standardized root mean square residual of 0.016. The two latent factors, representing anxiety and depression, were strongly correlated at r = 0.79 (p < 0.001).

Beyond internal structure, the researchers tested construct validity by examining whether PHQ-4 scores associated with occupational health risk factors, using multivariable logistic regression. Higher scores were significantly linked to long working hours, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.45 (95 percent confidence interval 1.10 to 1.92); to unsafe working conditions, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.63 (95 percent confidence interval 1.21 to 2.20); and to hazardous work exposure, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.38 (95 percent confidence interval 1.05 to 1.82). These associations do not establish that occupational hazards cause psychological distress, but they show that the instrument behaves as expected in this population, a pattern the authors describe as exposure-based construct validity.

The findings carry practical weight for low- and middle-income countries, where large-scale surveys and resource-constrained settings increasingly require ultra-brief screening tools. An ultra-brief screen that non-specialized personnel can administer quickly could support workplace surveillance, returnee health checks, primary care, and community outreach by nongovernmental organizations in Cambodia, the authors conclude.

Several caveats temper the conclusions. The study was cross-sectional, capturing a single point in time, and its sample was drawn from four high-migration provinces, so generalization to other regions or to migrants still abroad remains untested. Symptom levels in the sample were predominantly low, which means performance in high-distress or clinical populations would need separate evaluation.

Even with those limits, the study addresses a documented gap for a widely used international instrument. The evidence now on record supports the PHQ-4 as a reliable and valid ultra-brief screen among returned Cambodian migrant workers, and the authors point to its low-burden, scalable format for rapid mental health screening in resource-limited settings.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of the PHQ-4 anxiety and depression screening tool among returned Cambodian migrant workers

Article Title: Psychometric validation of the patient health questionnaire 4 items for screening anxiety and depression among returned Cambodian migrant workers

Article References: Chien, S., Liu, K.-L., Khov, H., & Chan, C.-C. (2026). Psychometric validation of the patient health questionnaire 4 items for screening anxiety and depression among returned Cambodian migrant workers. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00945-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00945-8

Keywords: PHQ-4, mental health screening, Cambodia, migrant workers, anxiety, depression, psychometrics, confirmatory factor analysis, occupational health, validation, cross-sectional study, Psychometric

The researchers focused on three infections of particular occupational relevance: syphilis, hepatitis B and HIV. Limited awareness or inadequate knowledge of these infections, the authors note, can increase the risk of occupational exposure and compromise the health and safety of healthcare workers themselves. To measure how well frontline staff understood these risks, the team recruited clinicians, nurses, medical laboratory scientists and ward attendants from every registered health facility in the local government area.

Data were collected using a pretested structured questionnaire that combined open-ended and close-ended response formats, and the responses were analyzed with IBM SPSS version 21.0 software. Awareness was assessed first with a simple dichotomous question asking respondents whether they had ever heard of blood-borne infections; anyone answering yes was counted as aware. Knowledge was then measured more rigorously among the aware respondents using eleven questions spanning four domains: the definition of blood-borne infections, their modes of transmission, their prevention, and the types of infections involved.

Each correct response earned one point and each incorrect response zero, producing a total score that could range from 0 to 11. Univariate and bivariate analyses were used to describe the variables and to assess associations between socio-demographic factors and knowledge levels. The headline result was encouraging at the level of basic awareness.

A large majority of respondents, 281 of the 330 surveyed, or 85.2 percent, had heard of blood-borne infections. Among those who were aware, the hospital was by far the most commonly reported source of information, cited by 142 respondents, or 50.5 percent. School came next at 85 respondents, or 30.2 percent, followed by health talks and seminars at 29 respondents, or 10.3 percent, and the media at 14 respondents, or 5.0 percent.

Awareness was not evenly distributed across professional categories. It was highest among clinicians, followed by medical laboratory scientists, then nurses, and lowest among ward attendants. Knowledge scores told a similar story.

Overall, 212 healthcare workers, or 75.4 percent of those aware of blood-borne infections, demonstrated good knowledge, while 69, or 24.6 percent, had poor knowledge. The analysis found that knowledge was significantly associated with educational qualification, age and professional category, indicating that the gaps in understanding are patterned along socio-demographic and occupational lines. The authors conclude that healthcare workers in Etsako West demonstrated varying levels of knowledge and awareness of blood-borne infections, and they state that these findings highlight the need for targeted educational interventions and regular infection prevention and control training to improve knowledge among all categories of healthcare workers.

The study's design and scope deserve attention when weighing its implications. It was a questionnaire-based survey confined to registered health facilities in a single local government area of Edo State, so the findings describe that specific workforce and setting rather than Nigerian healthcare workers as a whole.

Subject of Research: Knowledge and awareness of blood-borne infections among healthcare workers in Edo State, Nigeria

Article Title: Knowledge and awareness of blood-borne infections among healthcare workers in Etsako West Local Government Area, Edo State, Nigeria

Article References: Momodu, A., Shuaib, B. I., & Ogboghodo, E. O. (2026). Knowledge and awareness of blood-borne infections among healthcare workers in Etsako West Local Government Area, Edo State, Nigeria. BMC Infectious Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-026-14619-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12879-026-14619-2

Keywords: blood-borne infections, healthcare workers, hepatitis B, HIV, syphilis, occupational health, Nigeria, infection prevention and control, knowledge survey, Edo State, public health, Knowledge

The review mapped evidence concerning workplace violence and harassment, recognized psychosocial stressors that can affect cardiovascular health, and their links with clinical hypertension and continuous blood pressure levels. Researchers followed the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews, or PRISMA-ScR, framework. They searched 11 databases from inception through March 2026 and supplemented that search with Google Scholar screening and backward citation tracking of eligible studies.

The supplied abstract does not describe the workers’ locations, occupations or demographic characteristics, so the review’s findings should be understood as covering the populations represented in the included literature rather than all workers. Beyond the 10 consistently supportive studies, the remaining quantitative studies reported mixed findings, no clear association, or consistently inverse estimates. This variation was the central result of the review.

The authors identified heterogeneity across the evidence and methodological limitations that prevented them from drawing causal conclusions. Consequently, the available studies do not establish that workplace violence or harassment directly causes hypertension, nor do they establish a single uniform association across every population or analysis. Its findings indicate that some studies support a positive relationship between occupational violence or harassment and hypertension-related outcomes, while others do not show that pattern consistently.

The evidence therefore warrants attention as a potential occupational health concern, but the direction, strength and persistence of the association remain uncertain because the quantitative results are not uniform. The authors called for longitudinal studies that repeatedly assess both workplace violence and harassment exposure and blood pressure. Such research could help distinguish acute blood pressure responses from persistent changes and clarify the implications for occupational hypertension prevention.

Its overall conclusion is measured: workplace violence and harassment may be associated with hypertension and adverse blood pressure outcomes, but causal claims require stronger and more consistent evidence.

Subject of Research: Scoping review of workplace violence, harassment and hypertension-related outcomes

Article Title: Association between workplace violence and harassment and hypertension-related outcomes: a scoping review

Article References: Xu, S., Zhang, M., Li, K., Huang, Y., He, C., Tang, Y., Wang, X., & Zhang, Y. (2026). Association between workplace violence and harassment and hypertension-related outcomes: a scoping review. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-30008-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-30008-5

Keywords: workplace violence, workplace harassment, hypertension, blood pressure, occupational health, psychosocial stress, cardiovascular health, scoping review, longitudinal research, Association, between, workplace

Prevalence was highest among workers aged 40 years or older, reaching 41.0%, while 38.0% of female participants were classified as obese. These percentages describe the surveyed population and should not be read as population-wide estimates for all healthcare workers in Oman. The study excluded retired healthcare workers, pregnant women and private-sector employees, restricting its scope to workers employed by governmental healthcare institutions. It also used a structured, self-administered online questionnaire, including participants’ self-reported anthropometric measurements, rather than heights and weights measured directly by researchers.

Investigators used descriptive statistics to calculate the proportion of participants meeting the obesity threshold. They then performed bivariate analyses with chi-square tests or Fisher’s exact tests to examine relationships between obesity and demographic, medical, behavioural and workplace characteristics. A p-value below 0.05 was set as the threshold for statistical significance. The sample size prevented advanced multivariable modelling, so the study could not estimate the independent effects of multiple factors or adjust the reported associations for potential confounding. Its cross-sectional design also means that the timing and direction of relationships cannot be determined.

Past medical history was the only reported health factor significantly associated with obesity in the bivariate analysis. Obesity affected 50.0% of participants with a past medical history, compared with 33.5% of those without one, with a p-value of 0.031. The supplied study summary does not describe the conditions included in the medical-history measure. The result therefore establishes an association in this sample, not evidence that prior health problems caused obesity or that obesity contributed to the recorded conditions. Regular exercise was not significantly associated with obesity at the study’s predefined threshold: prevalence was 43.7% among workers who did not exercise regularly and 25.0% among those who did, but the difference yielded a p-value of 0.070.

Workplace food availability was the other statistically significant association. Obesity prevalence was 22.0% among workers who reported that healthy food was available at work and 43.2% among those who reported that it was unavailable, with a p-value of 0.033. This comparison came from an unadjusted bivariate analysis and does not demonstrate that providing healthier food would directly reduce obesity. Access to workout facilities, flexible working hours, a supportive workplace culture and wellness programs had no statistically significant associations with obesity in the reported analysis. Overall, the findings show that obesity was common in the surveyed governmental healthcare workforce and identify two significant bivariate associations—past medical history and availability of healthy food at work—while leaving their causal and independent effects unresolved.

Subject of Research: Obesity prevalence and associated health and workplace factors among governmental healthcare workers in Oman

Article Title: Prevalence and factors associated with obesity among healthcare workers in Oman: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Al-Kalbani, S. R., & Al-Qanubi, H. (2026). Prevalence and factors associated with obesity among healthcare workers in Oman: a cross-sectional study. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29939-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29939-w

Keywords: obesity, healthcare workers, Oman, body mass index, workplace nutrition, occupational health, physical activity, cross-sectional study, public health, Prevalence, factors, associated

The experiment took place at a packaging station built around a Universal Robots UR5 collaborative robot and a conveyor belt. Participants answered moderate-difficulty cognitive questions printed on packets, placed the packets into a box and positioned the completed box in front of the robot for packing. High-complexity episodes added a second task in which damaged packets had to be identified and excluded. The experiment contained nine episodes, with the first lasting approximately three and a half minutes, while task speed and complexity, lighting and noise were varied in predefined low and high settings. Low light was 50–60 lux, high light exceeded 250 lux, low noise was below 55 decibels and high noise was 80–85 decibels.

Twenty volunteers aged 18 to 55 took part, including 13 men and five women. People with neurological disease or cardiac implants were excluded, as were those unable to complete the activities or affected by color blindness. The experimental session lasted about an hour and began with a two-minute rest period. After each episode, participants completed the NASA Task Load Index, which measures perceived workload, and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, which supplied the anxiety-related target used in the most successful models. One participant withdrew after completing four episodes, leaving 175 episode-level observations. Quality control for artifacts, missing values and incomplete recordings reduced the machine-learning dataset to 147 samples, divided into 103 training samples and 44 test samples.

Neurophysiological data were recorded throughout the task using a 19-electrode wireless EEG system sampled at 4,000 hertz and a 21-channel fNIRS system sampled at 75 hertz. Gaze was tracked with Tobii Pro Glasses 3, while task error rate served as a behavioral measure. EEG data were cleaned with independent component analysis, downsampled to 250 hertz and filtered from 0.5 to 40 hertz. Features included average power in five frequency bands—delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma—and statistical measures such as variance, skewness, kurtosis and root mean square. For fNIRS, the researchers extracted linear measures including mean and standard deviation, plus nonlinear features such as entropy, box-count fractal dimension and detrended fluctuation analysis.

The machine-learning pipeline mapped physiological features to questionnaire results so that supervised models could learn the relationship between recorded brain activity and reported stress. Seven regression techniques and eight classification approaches were compared across EEG-only, fNIRS-only and combined feature sets, with five-fold cross-validation used during model development. Regression models estimated continuous STAI and NASA-TLX scores. NASA-TLX was already scored from 0 to 100, while the STAI score was rescaled from 1–4 to 0–100 for comparison. Classification divided STAI results into low, moderate and high groups, producing 82 low-stress, 31 moderate-stress and 34 high-stress samples. Feature selection was performed only on training data, and four ensemble strategies were considered: averaging, weighted averaging, majority voting and weighted majority voting. Gaze and behavioral measures were not direct model inputs; they were analyzed separately as supporting indicators of how participants responded to the changing conditions.

Data quality and preprocessing had a marked effect on model behavior. Before the final feature-selection stage, a combined fNIRS and EEG statistical model with NASA-TLX as the target reached 65.9% test accuracy and 63.1% validation accuracy, while the strongest unfiltered feature combination produced 67.3% test accuracy for STAI classification with 60.97% validation accuracy. Removing the first five seconds of each episode, when participants were not yet performing the cognitive task, and filling the resulting gaps by averaging raised a support-vector classifier to 79.55% test accuracy using fNIRS and EEG statistical features with STAI as the target; its validation accuracy was 66.02%. Normalization preserved that test accuracy, with validation accuracy changing to 64.08%. In regression, normalization allowed an SVM model to reach a test RMSE of 11.563 and a validation RMSE of 15.884 for STAI. The authors emphasize that a lower test error does not automatically make an unfiltered dataset superior: artifacts can produce deceptively good performance, whereas the smaller gap between validation and test results after quality control is more consistent with robustness and less overfitting.

Feature selection produced the headline results. For continuous STAI estimation from combined fNIRS and EEG spectral features, ReliefF retained 213 of 284 features and paired them with an ensemble of three classifiers, yielding the lowest reported test RMSE of 10.86. An F-test approach retained 211 features but produced an RMSE of 11.3269. Removing an entire EEG channel and six fNIRS channels when more than four of their features had been rejected slightly worsened the regression result to 11.1882, indicating that the broader feature set retained useful information. For three-class classification, a chi-squared procedure that eliminated features falling below 10% of the highest ranking retained 338 variables and achieved 84.1% accuracy with a seven-model ensemble. A different chi-squared threshold, using the 10th percentile for exclusion, retained 331 features and produced 79.54% accuracy. Channel-level pruning based on the best chi-squared configuration reduced accuracy to 77.27%, again suggesting that useful signals may be lost when complete channels are removed.

The final classifier was strongest at identifying low stress, where the reported F1 score was 0.941, with recall of 0.960 and precision of about 0.923. Its performance was weaker and more ambiguous for moderate and high stress: the moderate class had an F1 score of 0.706, precision of 0.750 and recall of 0.667, while the high class had precision and recall of 0.700 and an F1 score of 0.700. Of 25 low-stress samples in the test set, 24 were correctly classified; 6 of 9 moderate samples and 7 of 10 high-stress samples were correct. The researchers attribute some confusion between adjacent categories to overlapping physiological responses and the relatively small number of high-stress examples. The physiological features were also more closely aligned with STAI-based anxiety than with NASA-TLX workload, potentially because the latter combines several dimensions that do not all represent stress directly.

Eye tracking provided complementary behavioral evidence. Average fixation duration, maximum fixation duration and average visit duration were highest during the first episode and then declined through the ninth, while the number of visits increased, a pattern the authors interpret as a learning effect as participants became familiar with the task. Average pupil diameter was larger under low-light conditions—5–6 millimetres—than under high-light conditions—4–5 millimetres—and generally decreased as questionnaire scores rose. Participants also made fewer fixations on incorrect answers than on correct ones. Subjective scores responded to the experimental conditions: STAI was highest in the episode combining fast, complex work, high noise and low light, while NASA-TLX rose overall as the session progressed, consistent with cumulative task engagement and fatigue. The robot and human comparison appeared only once, so the similar scores in those final episodes do not establish a general difference between collaboration modes.

The study remains exploratory in several important ways. It was conducted in a controlled simulation with only 20 participants and has not been tested across other workplaces. The system does not yet operate in real time because signal preprocessing, feature extraction and prediction are performed offline. Normalization was carried out before the train-test split, potentially leaking information from the test set, while the sample-level split allowed participant-specific characteristics to influence both training and testing. Some movement-related artifacts also survived cleaning. The authors propose larger and more diverse studies, participant-wise or leave-one-subject-out validation, confidence intervals and significance tests, and development of adaptive real-time monitoring. They also built an Android application, Stress Sense, that converts predicted scores into a visual stress scale, although the evidence presented supports the predictive framework rather than real-time workplace deployment.

Subject of Research: Machine-learning estimation of perceived cognitive stress from EEG and fNIRS during a simulated human-robot factory workflow

Article Title: Transforming neurophysiological data into measurable stress metric using machine learning-based stress quantification framework for smart factory workers

Article References: Arif, A., Zakeri, Z., Omurtag, A., Breedon, P., & Khalid, A. (2026). Transforming neurophysiological data into measurable stress metric using machine learning-based stress quantification framework for smart factory workers. Frontiers in Neuroergonomics, 7, Article 1871817. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnrgo.2026.1871817

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnrgo.2026.1871817

Keywords: machine learning, workplace stress, EEG, fNIRS, human-robot collaboration, neuroergonomics, gaze tracking, feature selection, ensemble learning, occupational health, Transforming, neurophysiological

Researchers surveyed 181 nurses in Mampong and 129 in Agona, according to the study abstract published in BMC Nursing. Perceived stress, resilience and psychological well-being were measured with the PSS-10, CD-RISC-10 and WHO-5 scales, respectively. Sociodemographic and work-related information was collected through structured questionnaires. Chi-square tests examined associations involving sociodemographic variables, Spearman correlations assessed relationships among the three main measures, and multivariable logistic regression identified factors associated with good psychological well-being.

High stress was reported by 41.9% of nurses in Agona and 24.9% in Mampong. High resilience was reported by 8.5% of participants in Agona and 13.8% in Mampong. Perceived stress had a moderate negative correlation with psychological well-being, with correlation coefficients ranging from −0.655 to −0.675, and a moderate negative correlation with resilience, ranging from −0.552 to −0.560; both sets of correlations had p-values below 0.01. Resilience showed a moderate positive correlation with psychological well-being, with coefficients from 0.571 to 0.603 and p-values below 0.01.

In the multivariable analysis, higher resilience was associated with greater odds of good psychological well-being (adjusted odds ratio, 1.20; 95% confidence interval, 1.13–1.28), whereas higher perceived stress was associated with lower odds of that outcome (adjusted odds ratio, 0.86; 95% confidence interval, 0.83–0.91). Rotational shift work was also associated with lower odds of good psychological well-being (adjusted odds ratio, 0.35; 95% confidence interval, 0.13–0.94).

The findings apply to the 310 nurses included in the two municipalities and should not be interpreted as evidence that stress reduction or resilience-building programs would improve well-being. The authors stated that longitudinal and interventional studies are needed to determine the effectiveness of such interventions and establish causal relationships. The supplied source presents the study through its abstract and describes it as an early-access, peer-reviewed article that may undergo further editing before the final version of record.

Subject of Research: Associations among perceived stress, resilience and psychological well-being among 310 nurses in two Ashanti Region municipalities

Article Title: Perceived stress, resilience, and psychological well-being among nurses: a comparative study of two municipalities in Ghana

Article References: Darko, G., Anokye, G. A., Mensah, J. A., Badii, V. S., & Abem, K. A. B. (2026). Perceived stress, resilience, and psychological well-being among nurses: a comparative study of two municipalities in Ghana. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05367-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05367-4

Keywords: nurses, perceived stress, psychological resilience, psychological well-being, Ghana, Ashanti Region, cross-sectional study, shift work, occupational health, Perceived, stress, resilience

The researchers studied partner engagement with media advocacy as an implementation strategy for a workplace safety and health program. Members of the implementation team were interviewed at two time points. The first interviews took place after they had been trained in and had worked to develop media-advocacy strategies, but before media-advocacy campaigns began. Follow-up interviews were conducted two years after campaign launch and shortly before the end of the funded study period. The abstract does not report the number of interviewees, the specific agricultural settings, or details of the campaigns, so the scope of the sample and the extent to which the results can be generalized remain unclear.

At follow-up, team members described the intervention as difficult to implement because of the political and power contexts within their respective settings. Their generally limited engagement limited fidelity to media-advocacy principles. The researchers also identified cognitive dissonance in the interviews: team members praised individual components of media advocacy while continuing to reject media advocacy as an overall strategy. These are reported qualitative observations from the implementation team; the study did not quantify engagement or establish a causal effect of the political and power conditions on implementation.

The authors emphasized the potential influence of cognitive biases on team development and collaboration. Based on the study findings, they recommend substantial investment in team development before implementation efforts begin. That recommendation is grounded in the experiences reported by this implementation team rather than evidence that earlier team development would improve safety outcomes. The abstract does not assess changes in worker injuries, health outcomes, policy adoption, or the effectiveness of the media-advocacy campaigns themselves, and no such benefits should be inferred from the reported implementation experience.

Subject of Research: Partner engagement and implementation fidelity in a media-advocacy-based agricultural safety and health program

Article Title: Breaking from tradition: embracing new strategies to implement agricultural safety and health programs

Article References: Milkovich, P. J., Johnson, A., & Sorensen, J. A. (2026). Breaking from tradition: embracing new strategies to implement agricultural safety and health programs. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29961-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29961-y

Keywords: agricultural safety, occupational health, media advocacy, partner engagement, implementation fidelity, qualitative study, team development, cognitive dissonance, workplace safety, public health, Breaking, tradition

The review followed PRISMA 2020 guidance and was registered in PROSPERO as CRD420261429354. According to the abstract, the researchers searched major databases and grey-literature sources for literature published from January 2001 through May 2026. They included intensive-care studies reporting extractable alarm-fatigue scores in the quantitative synthesis. Scores measured with different instruments were transformed to a 0–100% scale of maximum possible score and pooled with a random-effects model. Because the associated factors were methodologically heterogeneous, they were synthesized narratively rather than statistically.

Factors reported as associated with alarm fatigue included false or non-actionable alarms, a high alarm burden, inadequate alarm-management knowledge and training, night shifts, overtime, workload, role overload, organizational limitations and technology-related difficulties. The abstract also reports associations with burnout, compassion fatigue, perceived stress, reduced nursing performance and medical-error tendency. These findings describe relationships reported in the included studies, not established causes. Randomized studies included in the review indicated that structured alarm-management education could reduce alarm fatigue and unnecessary alarm exposure, but the abstract does not provide pooled effect estimates for those interventions.

The review’s main limitation is the predominantly cross-sectional, self-reported and heterogeneous body of evidence, which limits confidence in many of the reported associations. Objective alarm data and validated patient-safety outcomes were not consistently available, and the very high heterogeneity further restricts interpretation of the pooled score. The authors call for prospective studies that incorporate those data. Based on the supplied abstract, the evidence supports alarm fatigue as a multifactorial occupational and patient-safety concern among ICU nurses while showing that the prevalence, associated factors and intervention effects remain uncertain.

Subject of Research: Alarm fatigue severity, associated factors and alarm-management interventions among ICU nurses

Article Title: Alarm fatigue severity and associated factors among intensive care unit nurses: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Article References: Hu, Y., Ye, W., Zhang, H., & Ma, C. (2026). Alarm fatigue severity and associated factors among intensive care unit nurses: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05328-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05328-x

Keywords: alarm fatigue, intensive care nurses, systematic review, meta-analysis, patient safety, occupational health, alarm management, burnout, Alarm, fatigue, severity, associated

The commission’s recommendations support implementation of Germany’s Hazardous Substances Ordinance and cover airborne workplace limits, biological monitoring values and biological reference values. The revised assessment of manganese and its inorganic compounds was among the ten changes made to current airborne exposure recommendations. Drawing on evidence from several commission working groups, the commission concluded that exposure to 0.05 mg of manganese per cubic metre of air is not expected to cause adverse health effects.

Manganese is especially relevant to metalworking because welding can generate dusts and fumes containing very small manganese particles. After absorption through the alveoli of the lungs, such particles can be distributed throughout the body and accumulate in the brain, where they can produce neurotoxic effects. For the manganese reassessment, the commission assessed 50 new studies.

These included large epidemiological cohort studies from Australia, South Africa and the United States, together with magnetic resonance imaging examinations of affected brain regions. Christoph van Thriel, head of the commission’s Working Group on Neurotoxicity and Sensory Systems and professor of neurotoxicology and chemosensory research at the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors at TU Dortmund University, said the studies were systematically compiled, correlated and evaluated in accordance with the commission’s assessment criteria. The evidence review combined epidemiological observations with brain imaging, supporting the commission’s scientific evaluation of airborne manganese exposure.

The commission’s annual List of MAK and BAT Values, now available in English, brings together recommendations for limiting hazardous exposures in occupational settings. A MAK value, or maximum workplace concentration, specifies the concentration of a substance in workplace air that is not expected to cause long-term harm when present as a gas, vapour or aerosol. The list also includes biological values derived from measurements in blood or urine.

These measurements allow occupational physicians and toxicologists to assess individual exposure resulting from contact with workplace substances. The recommendations therefore address both what may be present in workplace air and what has been absorbed by an exposed person. A biological work substance tolerance value, abbreviated BAT, corresponds to the concentration of a substance or its metabolites in blood or urine that a person can be exposed to throughout a working life without adverse health effects.

The list also contains biological reference values, known as BAR, which can be used to assess the extent of occupational exposure. The commission revised biological tolerance values in blood or urine for six substances in this year’s list, including sevoflurane, inorganic lithium compounds and strontium. These are values for assessing exposure through biological monitoring, and their use in occupational medicine is based on the scientific evaluation for the individual substance.

Three substances were newly added to the list of recommendations: benzophenone, melamine and p-toluenesulfonic acid. Benzophenone is used as a photoinitiator in the printing industry, in chemical synthesis and as a fragrance ingredient in cosmetic products. Melamine is used in the manufacture of melamine resins, which are employed in plastics and adhesives.

The newly established BAT value of 300 µg melamine per litre of urine provides a health-based reference value for assessing exposure in people who have absorbed melamine. This is an individual biological monitoring value rather than a new general limit on melamine in workplace air. For p-toluenesulfonic acid, described as a strong acid, the commission derived a MAK value of 0.2 mg/m³.

The compound is used as a catalyst in chemical synthesis, as a curing agent and as a descaling agent. Its addition therefore brings the substance into both the airborne exposure and occupational-health assessment framework maintained by the commission. As with the other entries, the values are accompanied by detailed scientific justifications, allowing readers to examine the evidence and the assessment methods used for the substances reviewed.

The complete documentation and method descriptions are available through the commission’s MAK Collection. The proposed amendments and new additions remain open for discussion until 31 December 2026. During that period, new data or scientific comments may be submitted to the commission.

This consultation period is part of the commission’s process for keeping its recommendations current with scientific findings. The open review does not itself create binding workplace rules, nor does it determine whether regulations will be adopted. Instead, the recommendations proceed through the stated regulatory route: initial assessment by the Federal Ministry of Labour’s Committee on Hazardous Substances and the drawing up of statutory regulations where necessary.

Over the past year, the commission published 70 outputs, including 40 MAK documentation reports, 10 BAT documentation reports, 10 descriptions of air-monitoring methods and 10 biomonitoring methods. Andrea Hartwig, commission chair and professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, said the publication volume reflected the voluntary commitment of scientists working together across disciplines within the commission. International access to the commission’s work has also increased.

Since spring 2026, new publications from the Permanent Senate Commission have been indexed in the US National Library of Medicine databases PubMed and PubMed Central. Hartwig said the inclusion reflected the quality and relevance of the commission’s work for evidence-based occupational health and safety worldwide. Substance documentation reports and method descriptions are available in the MAK Collection, while the commission’s other publications are available on an open-access basis so that the knowledge can be reused for scientific purposes.

The 2026 list thus combines reassessed exposure evidence, revised biological monitoring values, new substance entries and expanded access to the supporting scientific and methodological material.

Subject of Research: DFG assessment of occupational exposure limits and biological monitoring values for workplace chemicals

Article Title: Health and safety at work: DFG Senate Commission assesses the risk of chemical compounds

Article References: Health and safety at work: DFG Senate Commission assesses the risk of chemical compounds. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: occupational health, workplace exposure limits, hazardous chemicals, manganese, biological monitoring, welding fumes, neurotoxicology, chemical risk assessment, DFG, toxicology, Health, safety